


Once Upon a Beast Becoming

by antietamfalls



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Beauty and the Beast, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Beauty and the Beast Elements, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Druids, Folklore, M/M, Magical Realism, Mythology References, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-09 22:17:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4366277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antietamfalls/pseuds/antietamfalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An act of pride, a druid’s curse, an enchanted leaf; Sherlock’s torment has lasted an age. Hope arrives in the form of one John Watson, a man uniquely suited to break the spell. But with a single night to win his affections, Sherlock finds his carefully laid plans disrupted by a monstrous killer whose sights are set on the only thing he has left to lose: John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for downton-gabby, who won a Tumblr fic giveaway and requested a Beauty and the Beast AU. Thank you for the inspiration and for your extraordinary patience!
> 
> Writing from prompts can surprise you in the wildest of ways. That said, this is the closest I'll ever come to writing Fawnlock.

They caught him in the alder grove by rite of oak and rowan.

It was a night wrought in storm, with skies strewn in silvered rain and the drum of distant thunder. The druids were only five, an easy number for any of the folk to evade in native woods, but the fall of the autumnal equinox had enhanced their power precipitously. Sherlock found himself trapped.

Their torchlight flickered in the rain, casting uneven shadows within the folds of their long grey robes, and Sherlock bridled under the intense irritation he’d come to associate with human dealings. They had no respect for what came before. The Isle was not made for men.

“This is the woodwose?” asked the eldest of the druids, his face angular and solemn within his drawn hood. A heavy gold torc glinted beneath his wiry grey beard.

“It is,” confirmed another.

“Speak then, wode,” the druid said. “What have you to say?”

On his knees and held fast by two of the druids, their fingers digging into his rain-damp pelt, Sherlock glared upward with hateful contempt. Droplets of rain ran trails through his hair, dripping from his brow.

“Release me,” Sherlock demanded.

The druid regarded him, somber in his impassivity. “You do not deny you recognize my sons?”

He motioned to the two younger druids behind him, boys barely grown who wore the banded bronze about their foreheads. What did they know of the world, to anoint themselves learned? All druids were children. Obnoxious, useless, conceited children.

But Sherlock said nothing. He knew them, all right.

“And neither do you pretend you did not turn them away when they sought your aid?” continued their father. “That you insulted and debased them, and refused to help them when it was in your power to do so?”

“I treated them as they deserved,” Sherlock said. “Nothing more.”

The druid stiffened with affront, his eyes narrowing to all but shining embers in the torchlight. “There are those of your kind who would welcome us, wode. The sun sets on the age of the folk. You must learn to exist harmoniously with man.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “And perhaps that will be your fate.”

The druids had power, that was true, but Sherlock had never bothered to fear what they could do. They were a nuisance, a trifle, and he expected their kind to die out like any other woefully ill-adapted being.

The druid outstretched his hand and began muttering in his primitive tongue.

A great, unseen weight struck Sherlock, and with a sudden cry he sank prostrate into the soil of the grove. The arc of his horns thrummed against the sodden earth, the pressure at his back anchoring him in place, and when he could get no closer to the ground, his very essence began to leech from his body, draining away into the land below.

The spell burned as it settled. The shock made it unclear what the druid had unleashed upon him, but as Sherlock lay panting on the ground, he tentatively reached outward with his mind.

Terror arrived with what he found; the earth was him and he the earth, a binding of profound simplicity and interminable strength. It formed a sturdy physical boundary, the edges stretching only a handful of spans in any direction, locking him into a territory easily crossed in a half a day.

The druid had bound him to the banks of the Tamesis river like some common spirit. He could not leave. He could not roam.

Sherlock clawed at the spell with what little power he had, slamming against it as a fist upon a mountain. It shuddered through him and into the land, reverberating without breaking, and the horror of his sentence was revealed in its entirety.

The mud-stained hem of a grey robe appeared beside him. Sherlock lifted his head, panic choking his every breath.

“There is a chance to relieve yourself from this fate,” the druid gravely said. “Learn compassion for humanity, for those you despise shall be your salvation. Earn the love of one who sees you for what you truly are. Do this, and you shall be released from all bonds.”

“You can take your compassion and drown with it,” Sherlock growled, twisting in his desperation to break free. “I’d sooner die on this very spot.”

The druid ignored his protests. “One night you denied my sons refuge, and so one night you shall have to redeem your actions.”

Out of nowhere, a large oak leaf fluttered to the ground before Sherlock. The leaf was broad and thick with health, a dark ruddy green in the torchlight.

“Measure thusly,” the druid said. “As the sun sets on the eve of your first acquaintance, speak the name of your intended and the leaf shall be renewed."

Suddenly, the leaf shriveled to a brown and wrinkled crisp, as dead as those seen in late autumn.

"When its last color fades upon the sun's morning rise, your time is gone, and the name of your failure will no longer bring about its rebirth. Choose wisely, for every chance is singular.”

“Greenseers,” Sherlock spat. “Curse the lot of you!”

Unmoved by his blaspheming, the elder druid motioned to his brethren. They began to file away into the rainy forest, his sons sparing Sherlock glances of gloating satisfaction.

The torchlight waned in the pressing dark, and the elder druid deigned Sherlock a final moment of consideration as he struggled to his knees. “Do not think me pitiless, wode. Reconsider your attitude while you may. The augurs portend a dark future for the folk, when man and spirit are divided. I do not envy you the ages ahead if you fail to heed my words.”

They left Sherlock there in the grove, the ache of the curse still fresh in his bones, and for the first time in all of Sherlock’s remembering, he wept.


	2. Chapter 2

The Diogenes Club was as it ever was: dull, silent, and overrun with the deluded clout of those who  presumed to understand their place in the world.  

Hands stuffed in his coat pockets, Sherlock scowled as he paced in the foyer. The only sounds were the rustle of newspaper and creak of old leather, now and then joined by an asthmatic wheeze echoing in from the cavernous reading room. Ironic that this place bore the guise of soulless bureaucracy.

A tap on his shoulder drew his attention and he turned, finding Mycroft finally arrived to meet him. His brother regarded him with the level arch of one brow. Sherlock made a rude face in return, and to his delight, Mycroft rolled his eyes, disgusted.

The sedentary patrons didn't glance up as Sherlock and Mycroft threaded their way through the reading room, nor did they pay the slightest attention when they stopped before one of the wood-paneled walls, where thin gaps in the oak hinted at the outline of a door.

The age of the door did not become apparent until one examined it closely. The ancient woodgrain had been carved into tendrils of climbing vines and bouquets of leaves, dotted with the delicate buds of flowers long extinct. And if one looked long enough, the wild bloom of flora seemed to form the sprawling features of an inhuman face.

Mycroft gently placed his palm on the panel and it swung inward at his touch. Sherlock glanced out over the elderly humans of the Diogenes Club, all of them oblivious to the strange doorway that had opened in their midst. Mycroft ducked inside, and Sherlock followed.

Inside, a staircase of hewn earth curved downward beneath the oily glow of ceiling lanterns.

“This is quite irregular,” Mycroft said, finally free to speak as he led Sherlock down the passage. “He has not called summons in living memory of the lesser folk.”

Trailing his brother, Sherlock set his jaw. “Why now?”

Mycroft glanced back pointedly. “That is between you and him.”

The strain in his brother’s tone revealed his own confusion about the situation. Mycroft was the elder, the speaker, the one tasked to listen. Sherlock had done nothing to warrant recourse, praiseworthy or otherwise.

Down they descended, until the walls turned a richer black than the depleted soils of above. Sherlock briefly closed his eyes and breathed in the concentrated scent of pure, good earth. It had been so very long.

At the bottom of the stair, the dead roots of long-vanished trees formed a hollow beneath the land. Dozens of the folk had already gathered to hear the Green Man speak; impish folk and willowy folk, some so hardly removed from their true form that Sherlock wondered how they passed on the streets without constant staring.

It wasn’t uncommon for all eyes to gravitate toward him and Mycroft at gatherings of their kindred. They were the only woodwose in London, Sherlock by force and Mycroft by choice. This time, tense curiosity dominated their gazes, but the prime attention fell to the largest being of them all.

The Green Man was not as he was during Sherlock’s youth; the weight of the passing ages had affected him greatly. Wizened twigs sprouted from among the twining stems of his once-bushy beard. His hair and eyebrows sprouted with spongy lichen, the mosses more abundant now than the flowering foliage that once covered his head. The bark of his face had cracked wide with age, grey growths taking hold in the deep crevices. Woody vines anchored him to the roots in the wall, peeling with maturity.

Sherlock experienced a moment of inexplicable sadness. Was this the fate of them all?

The Green Man opened his eyes, revealing pale amber irises tinged with the chartreuse of soft, new wood. He gazed over those gathered, one by one, as if carefully accounting for their well-being.

“So few, so few,” the Green Man rumbled, great lips of polished boughs bending around the words like saplings in the wind. His eyes found Sherlock among the crowd. “Ah, young wode. There you are.”

At his side, Sherlock sensed Mycroft practically bristling with all the questions he wanted to ask. But it was the Green Man’s place to speak and theirs to listen, and Sherlock took what satisfaction he could in his brother's distress.

“You do not visit as you once did,” the Green Man continued to Sherlock. “How I have missed our talks.”

Sherlock folded his arm behind his back, impatient. “Is there a point to this, or have you summoned me for tedious reminisces?”

A few muttering gasps arose from those observing. They held to the old ways of deference for greater beings, but times changed and so had Sherlock.

The Green Man, decrepit as he’d become, failed to remark upon the insolence. “I call you here for sake of your plight," he said, his voice like timber falling in the forest. "A greenseer comes.”

That shut everyone up.

“Sand and stone have steeped with his blood,” the Green Man hummed. “Far from this place, the dry spirits of an ancient land name him. Through core of rock and heart of earth, I have heard their call. He comes. He is for us to claim.”

A cold claw of dread rose up Sherlock’s spine. The human greenseers were rare as to be gone entirely, and one had not set foot on the Isle’s shores since the last days of Vortigern.

He thought of the oak leaf hidden beneath the floorboards of Baker Street. He’d give up hope in the centuries since it came to him, and in so doing he had also forgotten the fear of pinning everything on one doomed night. People did not like him, and humans least of all. To think one might come to love him was inconceivably daft.

“It doesn’t matter if it's one greenseer or a hundred,” Sherlock said, frustration welling up against his wishes. “It won’t work. Everyone knows it won’t.”

“Hope is never lost until freely relinquished by those who keep it,” the Green Man said. “Do not misjudge yourself, young wode. Find him. Watch him. You shall guide him to his fate, and to yours as well.”

Sherlock yearned dearly for shaded glades and cool streams instead of concrete and steel and wilting parkland. The Green Man was warning him of a chance, slight as it was. It had been so long, being bound to these shores, and if there was a chance, any chance, he must take it.

Sherlock tilted his chin, the slightest of bows. He would enamor this greenseer and see what came of it.

Satisfied, the Green Man closed his eyes to slumber again.

 

* * *

 

His name was John, and he had no idea what he was.

Finding him was easier than Sherlock had expected. His eyes and ears around London reported back within hours of receiving their assignment: military man, recently returned from the Afghanistan, blond, carrying a cane.

Sherlock took over surveillance after that, though there always seemed to be the odd spriggan or hob tagging along in his wake, tittering in the trees or whispering behind the rubbish bins. The folk of London were annoyingly well-informed about Sherlock’s predicament and what precisely had to happen for him to be unbound.

 _Earn the love of one who sees you for what you truly are._ Obviously, it had to be a greenseer. No other human could see his true form. Even at their height, human greenseers were a relative scarcity. If Sherlock failed, if John turned away from him, his first and only chance for freedom in two millennia would disappear.

John was a solitary man by choice rather than nature. Sherlock saw it in the way he watched people from park benches, gripping his cane handle as small, wistful looks occasionally surfaced within the grim draw of his face. The expressiveness of his eyes almost seemed an unfair advantage; Sherlock read him like a picture book, straightforward and terribly uncomplicated.

John was also unquestionably bisexual, though he didn’t think of himself in such terms. It made Sherlock’s task infinitely less complex, since he needn’t abide the ridiculous standards adopted in recent centuries. He had been prepared to present in a female form if absolutely necessary, though it meant John would be in for a mighty shock when his greensight fully manifested.

It always began with a trigger, from what Sherlock recalled, and going by John's behavior, he had experienced his relatively recently. John often rubbed at his eyes until they were sore, blinking rapidly as though to dislodge a foreign irritation. He stopped and stared at spots where ancient spiritways wound through the earth, as if he knew something odd existed there but couldn’t place what it was. He brushed past a pretty young woman in a Tube station and instinctively flinched away, conscious on some level that she was a familiar in service to one of the cunning-folk. He didn’t seem to connect the worsening symptoms with his exposure to the parks of London, where the old forces of nature held strongest.

Sherlock watched and waited. He’d have but the first night of their acquaintance to charm John into infatuation, in itself a difficult labor without worrying whether John’s greensight was strong enough to perceive him. Had John been born in the druid’s age, the elders would have nurtured his talents with structured training. But the druids no longer existed, and as the days passed it became increasingly apparent that John was not developing as he should. He was a stubborn man, resistant to the natural course his senses wished to take, and Sherlock was forced to accept that which he had hoped to avoid. John needed guidance to advance beyond the early greensight.

It complicated matters, but Sherlock could not afford to heed the misgivings of his mind. The ironclad conditions of his release were not changing anytime soon.

So Sherlock planned. He filled in his data sets, analyzed John’s patterns, considered stratagems for influencing human psychology, and once sufficiently confident that every variable had been optimized, chose the fateful evening.

As the fading sunlight waned to a dusky orange, Sherlock stood in his flat, garbed in his battle-gear of a fresh-pressed suit, his trusty Belstaff coat, knit scarf, and leather gloves. He gently removed the oak leaf from its long hibernation beneath the hardwood, blowing dust from its dry and brittle surface. The dark stem curled inward, likely to snap before bending in the slightest, and the stiff edges formed bladed pinpoints sharp enough to draw blood.

"John Watson," he said, clear and deliberate.

A flush of green instantly tinged the inner veins. The color spread outward before his eyes, restoring the oak leaf to vibrant vitality, as bright and new as the heights of springtime.

Sherlock brushed his thumb along the soft, supple green. He'd tried it only once before, just to see if those who had imprisoned him had told the truth of the leaf's nature. That bygone night was spent in lonely vigil, watching the leaf slowly crumple and wither until, at dawn, it was dead yet again.

He slipped the leaf into his coat pocket and checked his phone for the time. The countdown had begun.

Glancing out the window at the last rays descending over London, Sherlock rubbed his gloved hands together in an effort to quiet his palpitating pulse. It was stupid to feel so ill at ease. He regularly exploited the frail minds of witnesses, suspects, and police officers to get what he wanted.

How hard could it be to manipulate a human into falling in love with you?

 

* * *

 

His name was Sherlock, and he was the oddest man John had ever met.

The headaches had brought John to the Criterion. He’d only meant to go for an aimless walk after an uninspiring dinner of eggs on toast, but as he hobbled past the open doors of the aromatic coffee shop, a ridiculous idea had struck. Was it caffeine withdrawal that was causing the incessant halos in his vision, the lines of pain beneath his skull, the constant resonance of a noise that wasn't quite there? He’d consumed enough coffee in Afghanistan to draw jokes that he bled the stuff, and his doctors had ordered caffeine off-limits after the surgery on his shoulder.

Inside, John queued up with the other addicts waiting to order their drinks, leaning on his cane and doing his best to ignore the way the overhead lights kaleidoscoped into patterns of overexposed green and red and scathing white. Flitting shapes and throbbing auras danced deliriously around the evening patrons, and he only made it two places in line before he had to retreat to a table in the corner to get a hold of himself.

His cane clattered against the second chair as John sat down, closing his eyes and miserably rubbing the heels of his palms into his temples.  The ambient babble of voices wasn't helping things, strumming the ache like an eager guitar string. He just wanted a damned _coffee_.

The sound of a cup sliding over wood captured his attention. John looked up to find a young female barista smiling at him.

“Willow bark tea,” she said. “From the gentleman over there.”

She pointed across the shop toward a man seated at a far table. Casually reclined against the backrest of his chair, he was dressed in an impossibly expensive suit and watching John with luminous, pale eyes from beneath a fringe of dark curls. The air around him seemed to flow like running water, but it was more controlled than the frenzied effects surrounding everyone else. Perhaps even a little bit soothing.

“I’m here for a coffee, actually,” John said to the barista.

She pointed at the tea. “He says it will help with the visual distortions.”

John narrowed his eyes at the man across the room. “Does he?”

The tea had a woody scent, like the herbal balms his gran used to make from the plants in her garden. John stood, picking up his cane in one hand and the steaming cup in the other.

The man who sent the tea smirked when John arrived at his table. He was nursing his own drink, some sort of white tea by the look of it. The gentle flowing effect surrounding him was even more pronounced up close. He wore it like a magnificent cape, and it was almost enough to make John believe it was a completely ordinary thing despite the fact that it _wasn’t_.

“Evening,” the man said.

His casual tone and unexpectedly deep voice threw John for a second. Or perhaps it was the disquieting intensity of his eyes, checking John in a flicker of silvery blue-green.

John consciously clamped his jaw closed. “How did you know?” he asked.

The man glanced up, almost coyly. “Know what?”

“About the—" John shot a sidelong look at the neighboring tables and abruptly lowered his voice. “About what’s wrong with my eyes. You sent the tea, didn’t you?”

“Whatever makes you think there’s something _wrong_ with them?” the man hummed, and took a sip of his tea.

“I’m a doctor,” John said. “I think I know when something isn’t working right.”

“I’d drink that before it gets cool,” the man advised, eyeing the willow bark tea in John’s hand.

John pursed his lips in irritation and slammed the cup down on the table's surface, sloshing the hot liquid over his fingers.

“Do you know what’s happening to me or not?” John demanded.

The man blinked several times, finally roused enough to pay John his full attention. He uncrossed his long legs and shifted upright in his seat.

“Possibly," he said. "It’s tricky, this sort of thing. Perhaps you're in need of a detective.”

John's eyebrows arched skeptically. “A detective?”

“Consulting detective. The name is Sherlock Holmes.”

John shook his head, confused. “And how is a detective supposed to help me?”

“You’re looking for answers, aren’t you?" Sherlock pointed out. "I happen to be especially skilled at finding them. Even the stranger ones.”

Possibly, Sherlock was insane. Probably, he actually believed the mad words coming out of his own mouth. John had half a mind to believe it, too; after months of worsening headaches, he was no closer to figuring out how to stop them. Desperate times, and all that...

John lowered into the chair across from Sherlock. “John Watson.”

Sherlock's face beamed with suppressed triumph. He gestured at John's cup of tea. “Drink. Describe your symptoms to me.”

“Well, I suppose it all started at the end of my last tour in Afghanistan,” John began. “I was shot. At first I thought it was nerve damage, but a shoulder injury wouldn’t affect my eyesight. I hear buzzing sometimes. Persistent scotomata. Colors shift in and out, especially around other people. There’s flashes… like film moving at high speeds, but I can’t quite make out the images. Green. Lots of green.”

Sherlock’s pale fingers were steepled together in front of his mouth, elbows perched on each arm of his chair. But he wasn’t looking at John as if he’d just escaped the mad house, either.

“Do you know what it is?” John asked.

Sherlock lowered his hands. “Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got the most exquisite eyes?”

John blinked. “Pardon me?”

“Your eyes. Exquisite, and all that rubbish," Sherlock quickly said. "Isn’t that what people like? Compliments about their physical attributes? Maybe something else.” He went pensive for a moment before turning his gaze back to John. “What a lovely set of ears. Your zygomatic arches are quite pleasing.”

This was not a real conversation. Normal, sane people did not have conversations like this. John stared at him. “Are you… trying to flirt with me?”

Something just short of panic blazed through Sherlock's expression, though it was quickly tamped down. He folded his arms with excruciating nonchalance. “Of course not. Just a test, obviously. Got to be thorough about potential clients.”

John pushed his tea away. “This is a joke. You’re having me on for a laugh or something.”

Sherlock's eyes went sharp. “Don’t be an idiot, John.”

“Ta for this, but I think I’m done here,” he said, turning in his chair.

Long fingers landed on the cuff of his jacket, keeping him in place. "There are things in this world you haven't the faintest hope of understanding on your own," Sherlock warned. "You'll find no answers if you walk out that door."

John paused and looked at Sherlock. His tone matched his eyes, infused with a biting, magnetic quality that threatened to draw you in and cut you to ribbons before you knew what hit you. John wavered on the edge, a diver poised on the precipice of shark-infested waters and knowing he shouldn't want to jump in.

Just at that moment, the young barista suddenly appeared at the table side, motioning toward Sherlock’s empty cup. “Are you finished with that, sir?”

Hand withdrawing from John's wrist, Sherlock leveled her with a scathing glare. “Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something?”

She reached for the cup, picking it up. “Sorry, sir, I’ll just clear that for you—"

“It doesn’t matter!" Sherlock said, waving her off. "Just go!”

She shied a bit at Sherlock's tone before glancing between John and his untouched tea. “Shall I get you that coffee?” she asked, with no small amount of sympathy.

“ _For God’s sake_ ,” Sherlock thundered, “leave us be or I’ll tell you all about how your boyfriend is cheating on you with your flatmate who, by the way, borrows your clothes without your knowing and routinely gets high as kite while you're gone, against your express wishes. I imagine you’ve wondered where that smell is coming from.”

The poor girl dropped Sherlock’s cup in shock, shattering the ceramic on the floor, and burst into tears right there in the middle of the coffee shop. Everyone was staring directly at them, their faces varying degrees of mortified and appalled. One of the workers came over to collect the jagged pieces of Sherlock's cup and mop up the dregs while another steered the girl into the back room. Gradually, the bustle of the coffee shop returned.

"Where was I?" Sherlock started up, as if nothing had just happened. "Oh, that's right—" He cut himself off, blinking. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

John shook his head, awed at his obliviousness. “Sherlock, you just sent that girl into tears over a dingy cup."

“I told her to leave us alone," he protested.

“And practically ruined her life in the process,” John chastised. “How did you do that?”

“Ruin her life? _I_ didn’t ruin anything. It’s her own fault for associating with—“

“No, how did you know all that about her flatmate? Obviously it was true, or she wouldn’t have cried.”

Sherlock's hurt look vanished and he straightened in his seat, bridling like some exotic bird readying its plumage for display. “Simple deductive methodology, John. Stains on her clothes, the fabric stretched around the shoulders from being worn by someone else, the faint aroma of…” He trailed off, unsure. “You didn’t like it. What I did.”

“Well, no, not the crying bit," John admitted. "But the rest was rather amazing.”

Impossibly, a pink blush tinged Sherlock’s pale face.

“Detective, was it?” John quietly asked.

Sherlock cleared his throat. “ _Consulting_ detective.”

“Can you really help me, or can’t you?”

“I’ll certainly do my not-inconsiderable best," Sherlock said. "Give me an evening to prove myself. If tomorrow you’re dissatisfied with the answers I’ve provided, I won’t pester you again.”

“And what do you want for all this? I haven’t any money—"

“It’s pro bono for the interesting cases."

John let that sink in for a moment. “You’re saying I’m interesting?”

The corner of Sherlock's mouth went taut, hinting at a smirk. “There’s potential,” he allowed. "Now drink your tea."

In for a penny, John figured, in for a pound. He obligingly reached for his cup and and took a long draught. It tasted just as it smelled, like a mouth full of watered-down mulch. The warmth was comforting, at least, and after a few more sips John thought he sensed a release of tension behind his eyes.

Sherlock's phone chimed. He pulled it from his pocket at looked down. “Oh.”

As he studied the screen, Sherlock's eyes lit up as if he’d got a brilliant idea. He fixed John with a playful grin. “You’re a doctor. Care to see a dead body?”

“Depends on who put it there,” John drily replied.

Sherlock's smile broadened. “It wasn’t _me_. Scotland Yard texted. There’s been a murder.”

“A murder,” John echoed incomprehensibly.

Sherlock rose from his seat and pulled his dark coat from the backrest. It swirled dramatically as he shrugged it on. “Detective, remember?”

“You do murders as well?" John mused. "Why am I not surprised.”

“Coming?”

John stood and grabbed his cane and, after a moment’s pause, downed the rest of the willow bark tea before following after Sherlock.

 

* * *

 

It was an uncommonly clear night on the banks of the Thames. As John paid the cabbie, Sherlock snuck to the curbside and clandestinely extracted the oak leaf from his coat pocket. It had only been an hour or so since dusk, but the sinuous edges of the leaf were already mottled with brown, the veins turning woody and stiff. It would be dried and dead by sunrise, and with it all hope of John breaking the curse that burdened him.

Sherlock quickly hid the leaf back in his pocket when he heard the clack of John's cane on the pavement. Lestrade's summons was unplanned, but fortuitous all the same; only a man with an adventurer's heart would run off to become an army doctor. The intrigue, the mystery, and another round of showy deductions might work in Sherlock's favor.

The sound of the river’s flow faded into the background as Sherlock followed John’s slow descent down the embankment steps. Below on the rocky shore, police lights formed lonely pools of yellow among the blue-black of oncoming night.

When they reached the bottom, Sherlock ducked under the police tape and held it up for John, who shot Sherlock a curious look but passed underneath without comment. An interesting trait, that; the doctor's earlier suspicion seemed to have vanished once he deemed Sherlock worth trusting.

Down the beachhead, Lestrade and a few of his officers were gathered around the focus of all the police lights. A body on the shore.

"Wait here," Sherlock said to John. "I have something to discuss with Lestrade."

Mycroft had always shown a predilection for the shapeshifters, particularly those that transformed into handsome human males, and of course he had found the odd one out that harbored ambitions in law enforcement. These days, Mycroft stayed in London more often than not, and Sherlock suspected it had more to do with his kelpie dalliances than his bureaucratic hobbies. Lestrade belonged to the river, and though an impressive river it might be, his range was only a hair's breadth larger than Sherlock’s.

When Sherlock reached him, Lestrade's attention was fixed in the distance beyond Sherlock's shoulder. “That him?” he asked, low but excited.

“Yes,” Sherlock told him.

Lestrade's eyes widened in wonderment. He nearly stood up on his tiptoes. “Really? Can he see us?”

“Do you think he’d be standing there as calm as that if he could?”

Lestrade's gaze snapped back to Sherlock. “Christ, an actual greenseer. Never thought I’d see one of those in the flesh. How’s it coming, then? Any luck?”

Sherlock ignored the questions. “I believe you mentioned a corpse I needed to see. Urgently, in fact."

The body was of a young girl, preternaturally soft of feature and wearing a flowing silvery dress. Her bare, muddy toes protruded from the hem of the ragged fabric and tiny white flowers were strung in the strands of her pale brown hair.

“A nymph,” Sherlock said, surprised. “A water-nymph.”

“Haven’t had a dead one in a while," Lestrade said, stuffing his hands into his coat pockets. "She washed up on the shore. A boy with his dog found her just past supper time.”

Sherlock lowered down to crouch beside the body. There were no wounds, no bruises, no signs of struggle. “A freshwater nymph does not die from drowning in the Thames.”

“Figured that out on my own, funny enough,” Lestrade sighed. “I know every spirit that lives in this river from Reading on down to the open sea. Don’t know this one.”

“I do,” Sherlock said. "I've seen her before."

“You have?”

“Weeks ago. When the Green Man told me about John. She was there, in the crowd.”

"You think it's connected?" Lestrade asked.

A prickle of worry itched at the top of Sherlock's spine. He rose to his feet, spinning round to face Lestrade. “Whatever this is, it’s about John. Why else kill a lowly nymph?”

Lestrade frowned. “You think someone’s after him.”

Sherlock gave him a pointed look. “The first greenseer on the Isle in fifteen centuries? I think we’ve got ourselves an adherent to the old ways. There was a time I would’ve agreed.” He glanced at the nymph's corpse. "In principle, not in practice."

"All right, so where did she come from?" Lestrade pressed on. "If we can find the site of the murder..."

"This city is swamped in freshwater," Sherlock said. "It's a needle in a haystack. We'll never find her source unless we enlist substantial help, and we don't have that sort of time."

This impeded things considerably. Under the best of circumstances, Sherlock's contacts among the folk might produce a lead or two within a day. He needed something expedient, so he didn't waste the night plodding around on a useless stretch of...

His eyes landed on John up the beach, watching them from afar.

"I could put a call in to Mycroft," Lestrade distantly suggested. "He's got the resources—"

But Sherlock was already beckoning John with a wave. John caught the gesture and began trudging toward them over the stony sand.

"John, this is DI Lestrade of Scotland Yard," Sherlock said when he'd arrived.

Lestrade extended a hand. It took him a full few seconds to find his voice. "Wonderful to meet you."

John's eyes darted around Lestrade's body, and Sherlock wondered what he was seeing. A mane? A tail? Probably none of those, given that he hadn't yet run off in fright, but he was certainly detecting something unusual coming from Lestrade.

"John Watson," was all he said, taking Lestrade's palm for a firm handshake.

"Well, I promised you a dead body," Sherlock said. "What do you make of it?"

John turned his attention to the nymph on the sand. He blinked, captivated by what he saw, and stepped closer to get a better look. "Now this is odd," he murmured to himself.

He hummed a little as he began his examination, perhaps in sympathy for the dead. If Sherlock hadn't known he was a doctor before now, it would quickly have become obvious. John was methodical in his study, if not meticulous, but neither trait granted Sherlock whatever hidden information lingered on the body.

"Focus on her," Sherlock coaxed. "Not the physical body. _Her_."

John's fingers tightened around the handle of his cane, and as he concentrated, his shoulders drew back into a rigid line. The strain was a concern; as far as Sherlock knew, exercising greensight was not supposed to be so difficult. Was this what all the ancient druids had gone through to break their limited worldview?

After a moment, John exhaled sharply and staggered back a step. He looked over at Sherlock, blinking with astonishment. "What is she?” he asked. “If it's even a she?"

"You tell me," Sherlock said evasively.

John shook his head. "I don't know. It’s not… there's a sense of water. Gallons of it, gushing. Fresh, but not filtered. It's still got living things in it."

Sherlock felt a sinking disappointment. "Freshwater? That's all?"

“No, hold on,” John said, returning his gaze to the nymph. “Not freshwater. Not exactly.”

John lifted his left hand as if trying to grasp something unseen, his fingers opening and closing around thin air. “Minerals. Running water. A wellspring fountain."

"Bugger me," Lestrade said, softly awed.

Sherlock's brain was already ablaze with deductions. Fountain nymphs were rarer than their freshwater cousins, and the possible points of origin fewer still.

"I need a map," Sherlock announced.

In short order, Lestrade produced a map of greater London. Sherlock unfolded it onto one of the portable containers for the light equipment and pulled a thick-nubbed pen from his pocket, removing the cap with his teeth. Lestrade angled a torch onto the creased paper and Sherlock began marking dots all around the map.

“These are the major fountains," Sherlock said as he worked. "Granary Square, Somerset House, Russell Square Gardens… no, no, _no_. Too new, too new."

“How old are we talking?” Lestrade asked.

“Something here before the rest of it. Something easily occupied.”

Off to the side, John was massaging the inner corners of his eyes. “Well, then what’s the oldest fountain in London?”

“The baths,” Sherlock instantly replied.

Lestrade snorted. “Hold on, the 'Roman' baths on the Strand? That’s a hoax isn’t it? Built to fool the tourists.”

“I assure you, it’s quite authentic," Sherlock said, tapping the pen hilt against his chin. "At least, the lower parts are. Why didn't I think of it before? If she isn't from the baths, the nymphs there are older. They might have information about their dead sister.”

"Wait, _nymphs_?" John cut in.

Sherlock looked at him. There was no longer time for beating around the bush. John's life might be at risk, and the sooner he accepted the existence of the folk, the better.

"Crinaeae, specifically," Sherlock told him. "Nymphs of water wells and fountains."

John stared straight back. "Oh. All right."

An inexplicable flutter of pride warmed Sherlock's insides. In the face of mounting evidence, John did not blindly reject the obvious conclusion, no matter how improbable it seemed. Indeed, there was considerable hope for John’s progress in the hours ahead. Sherlock shoved the warm feeling away before it could creep anywhere noticeable.

"We'll need a warrant," Lestrade advised. "Could take a few hours."

Sherlock drummed his fingers together impatiently. "So be it," he said. "John, fetch us a cab up on the street. I'll be with you shortly."

John's eyebrows drew together and Sherlock could see the questions there, just below the surface of his gaze, but John nodded, his mouth tightening, and he turned to make his slow progress toward the embankment stair.

"Spread the word amongst the folk of London," Sherlock told Lestrade as soon as John was out of earshot. "Tell them there's a killer loose, and it's one of us. See if we can't smoke it out before it sets its sights on a larger target."

"Do you really think it's after John?" Lestrade asked.

"I don't believe in coincidences," Sherlock said.

Lestrade's eyes drifted to the lone figure climbing the stairs. "And second chances? What of those?"

Sherlock had wisdom enough to keep his mouth shut.

“I know what it is to be bound to a place,” Lestrade said, glancing out toward the dark waters of the Thames.

“The woodwose are not river-kind," Sherlock muttered. "We’re meant to roam.”

"Be patient. And if it doesn't work out, you never know when another chance might come."

"Another chance?" Sherlock gave a dispirited snort. "We’re experiencing something of a drought, when it comes to human greenseers. Frankly, I never expected to see another in my lifetime. He probably thinks I’m nothing but a pompous, self-centered show-off.”

Lestrade lifted an eyebrow. “Aren’t you?”

“Shut up, Lestrade. Don’t think I don’t know about the dressage equipment hidden in my brother’s boudoir.”

He didn't even have the courtesy to look embarrassed. God, to think of it: a woodwose and a kelpie. Sherlock had heard about unorthodox unions among the folk in his time, but none of them quite so disturbing as to involve _Mycroft_.

Lestrade shrugged. “Could be worse. I could be human.”

“That’s not funny,” Sherlock grumbled. He started for the stair. “We’ll meet you at the baths.”

“Where are you going?”

“John could do with a meal," Sherlock called. "It’s exhausting him, this sight business.”

John was waiting on the pavement when Sherlock reached the top. Behind him, a cab idled in the road, its meter undoubtedly running strong as it held for their fare.

Sherlock paused when he noticed the greenseer's focused expression. “John?” he asked. "Are you all right?"

John was clutching his cane and squinting down at the beach. “Do you see hoofprints, just there?”

He pointed in the direction of Lestrade, who was chatting with his sergeants.

Sherlock turned to look. “Hoofprints?”

“He leaves them when he walks. Right there in the sand.” John glanced up at Sherlock, vaguely unsettled. “I think I need a drink.”

Sherlock smiled and tugged lightly at his arm, directing him toward the cab. “I know just the place.”


	3. Chapter 3

The restaurant was Italian, and John guessed by the vigor of the proprietor's handshake that Sherlock had performed some service for which he felt perpetually indebted. Angelo incurred a barrage of sensation when John laid eyes on him; hot stone and dry caverns, not unlike the desert landscapes of Afghanistan. They weren’t images, per say, but like the nymph on the beach John seemed to know them just by looking.

It was late by all accounts, but Angelo reopened the shop just for them, and soon they were seated in a comfortable booth with a frankly absurd selection of dishes for sampling. There was wine to go with it – as promised by Sherlock – and John resolved to drink himself into a state of insensate indifference toward the evening’s weirdness.

Angelo treated John with the sort of unwarranted reverence that Lestrade had demonstrated, shaking his hand and shooting Sherlock flashes of an excited grin. He placed a small candle on the table between them before Sherlock finally repelled him with a glare.

“What’s his problem?” John asked.

“Short answer? He’s a meddling idiot,” Sherlock grumbled.

Whether from the willow bark tea or simply getting out for a dose of fresh air, John’s visual problems had settled down significantly since joining up with Sherlock. The man still seemed to be surrounded by a morass of gently melting air, but the lights weren’t so bright and the distortions from people walking past the window weren’t quite as intrusive. John figured he was either gaining a semblance of control or completely losing his mind. Sherlock was just as likely to be party to both.

The closest pasta dish was laden with bits of spicy sausage, and John took several introspective bites. Sherlock remained to be puzzled out, but the same wasn’t true for John’s other new acquaintances.

“Lestrade is a water-horse," he concluded after finishing half the plate. “Or a kelpie, or whatever you want to call it.”

Sherlock studied John over the steeple of his fingers, but didn’t say a word.

“My gran warned me about those,” John continued, swirling his fork through the sauce. “They pull people underwater and eat them alive, then spit the bones and entrails back onto shore.”

Sherlock lowered his hands. A soft smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. "Come now,” he said. “I doubt Lestrade’s devoured a living human for a century, at least.”

John stared at him for a suspended moment. Then Sherlock’s smirk broke into a grin, and before John knew they were both giggling like the mad idiots they were. It felt like the first time he’d truly laughed since coming home, when he was not only at a loss for purpose, but sanity as well.

So Lestrade was a legendary creature of the deep that didn’t actually exist, and they’d examined the corpse of a mythical fairy being that had lived in a decorative water feature somewhere in London, and John was… what? Turning into one of them? Joining an impossible world full of impossible things?

But it _was_ possible, wasn’t it? In fact, it was hardly the first time John had ever heard of it…

“My gran always said she could see things in the garden. Brownies and boggarts and the like.” John glanced thoughtfully down at his hands on the tablecloth. “Silly old gran, going on about her stories to make us children laugh.”

“You think she actually saw something?” Sherlock asked.

John shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now. She’s long since passed.”

He washed things down with a swallow of the dry white wine. Sherlock was doing a fine job of denying himself the table’s spread, and John vaguely wondered if it was a quirk of personality or something more telling.

“It’s genetic,” Sherlock idly ventured. “Runs in families. If you had been born an age ago, they’d have taken you for training. You’d master your skills with proper tutelage and oversight.”

“And what would that make me? Merlin?” John chuckled at the nonsense.

Sherlock wasn’t laughing anymore. “A druid, here on the Isle,” he said. “Elsewhere a soothsayer, a diviner, a mystic. They’re never short on names for things.”

John set down his wine glass. “You don’t like names, I take it.”

“Names are static. They do not account for change. All things change in time.”

“Does it have a name, then? What I do?”

Sherlock’s pale gaze flicked up to meet John’s. He hadn’t decided whether Sherlock’s eyes were grey or blue or green, or all of them at once.

“Some call it greensight,” he said.

John nodded slowly. “Well, there _is_ a lot of green. Do you have it as well? I can see it coming off you.” He lifted a hand, stroking the invisible air around Sherlock. “It doesn’t hurt when I look at yours.”

"No,” Sherlock said. “Not as such."

John visually traced the indistinct ripples coalescing around Sherlock. He was one of them. Like Lestrade and Angelo and the poor girl on the beach, except that John got nothing revealing from just looking. It was like a shroud he wore, hiding himself from prying eyes.

He’d known Sherlock was keeping something from him – several somethings, in fact – but this was a mystery he wasn’t sure he should solve. Could Sherlock be trusted? Had he made an awful mistake?

“Ask, if you’re going to,” Sherlock said quietly.

Christ, he was observant. John felt a small chill go through him.

"It's fine,” John said, because it really wasn’t his place to ask what Sherlock was. There was no inventing someone like him, regardless of what hid underneath. “It doesn't matter."

A genuine gleam of surprise passed through Sherlock’s eyes. John resumed picking over the food as if it weren’t any sort of big deal. It wasn’t.

“Can you introduce me to the others?” John asked as he finished off the closest dish, something with red peppers in the sauce. “The druids?”

“I don’t know of any,” Sherlock admitted. “Living, at least. Not on the Isle. There are groves, though. Sacred groves the druids once tended. The bridge is thinner in those places.”

“What are they like?”

Sherlock closed his eyes and let out a gentle hum, deep in his throat. “Ancient. Imbued with the energies of the natural world, like electrical currents dancing across your skin. Gooseflesh in a cool breeze. Trees with a presence older than anything you’ve felt. Pools of crystalline water. A sanctuary for any that call themselves steward of the old ways.”

The longing in his tone seemed to bleed right into John. A heartache for a place he’d never known, or known only in a dreamlike wake. Deep and hypnotic and pining for something beyond, something more than reality could offer.

Sherlock might be different, but so was John.

“Finished?” Sherlock asked.

John blinked away his stupor and nodded, shedding his napkin. The food had done a world of good, even if he was still far from intoxicated.

A darkly calculating look had entered Sherlock’s eyes. “Good. I think it’s time you had a proper lesson.”

 

* * *

 

Sherlock gently pressed on the drying surface of the oak leaf, testing the brittleness. He heard a faint crinkle and ceased the abuse, convinced that sufficient pressure would crack the leaf entirely in half. The repercussions of such an injury were unknown; would his next attempt be cut short if the leaf was broken? It might be centuries before fate conspired to give him another greenseer.

The scuffling sound of John reaching the rooftop signaled him to put the leaf away. The stars had risen in full force in the London night sky, streaking milky torrents into the great black nothing. The light pollution of the city seemed to barely affect the luster of the twinkling constellations.

John’s blond head bobbed over the roof ledge as he pulled himself up the last rung of the ladder, cane tucked under one arm, his eyes awash in wonder at the celestial display above them. An anxious twisting began in Sherlock’s stomach, painfully aware of the half-dead leaf in his pocket and encroaching deadline it heralded. Sunrise was mere hours away.

The business of seduction was proving more complex than anticipated. John wasn’t exhibiting the classic human signs of attraction – vascular constriction, increased respiration, deepening vocalizations. Like everyone else, he didn’t seem partial to Sherlock’s particular quirks. If it wasn’t for his inherent morbid curiosity and Sherlock’s promises to help him, John would probably have nothing to do with him.

John waited expectantly on the rooftop, an edge of skepticism alive in the curve of his shoulders. He wasn't sure what they were doing there.

Properly stimulated, the human body behaved in all manner of suggestible ways.

“Close your eyes, John,” Sherlock said.

A beat of silence spread between them.

"Why?" John asked.

Sherlock sighed. "Do you want a lesson or not?"

"Fine, fine," John relented, and Sherlock caught the tail end of a smile as he shut his eyelids and crossed his hands over the handle of his cane. "My eyes are closed."

He raised his chin, instinctively seeking the caress of the starlight as it bathed him in silver and shadow. A cloak of grey and a set of bronze bands at his brow and throat were the only pieces missing, and Sherlock suppressed a shudder at the thought of John among those who had done this to him.

Sherlock made a slow circle of John. "The injury to your leg. It's psychosomatic, but you already know that. You can fix it yourself. I can show you how."

John quirked his eyebrows together but didn't open his eyes. Sherlock stopped in front of him and reached out with the flat of his palm, letting it hover only centimeters from John's bad leg.

"Feel the heat from my hand," he said in a purposeful rumble. "Feel it pass through empty space, from my skin to yours."

The noticeable bobbing of John's throat signaled success. He cleared his throat, head piquing toward the sound of Sherlock's voice. Sherlock pressed his luck and sidled even closer. The edges of his coat gently brushed John's jeans, and John shifted a little where he stood.

"Energy is energy no matter the channel," Sherlock went on. "The same goes for the conduction of your nerve endings. Focus on it. Every place you sense pain. Let it dissipate into thin air."

Sherlock watched him concentrate, tiny patterns of lines forming in the center of his forehead, and the warmth radiating from his body seemed to touch Sherlock everywhere at once. His soft scent reminded of shady riverbanks and clean rainstorms and the sweet wind off a copse of wild hazel.

John's eyes drifted open. There came a clack of lightweight metal that Sherlock registered as the cane dropping to the rooftop, and pure wonderment bloomed across John's face. He looked down and Sherlock belatedly realized just how close together they stood, practically breathing each other's air. Sherlock backed away, hoping the flush burning in his cheeks wasn't visible in the starlight.

"Incredible," John marveled, rubbing at his thigh as he took a few experimental steps. "Christ, it's like it was never there."

Sherlock cleared his throat. "It wasn't, though, was it—"

That was when Sherlock saw the dozens of tiny eyes blinking back at them in the darkness. The low ledges lining the roof had been colonized by an enormous assortment of sprites, sylphs, hobs, and other minor members of the folk, including a pair of pixies that had come skulking out from whatever filthy skip they’d been living in.

Just what he needed. A bloody audience. Angelo must’ve spread the word they’d come round for dinner. Sherlock ignored the excited chittering of their voyeurs and focused back on John, who couldn’t see them anyway and was under the impression they were still alone on the rooftop.

"Sherlock?" John asked, straightening. "Something the matter?"

Sherlock shook his head. "Of course not."

"So what's the next lesson?"  
  
"Hmm?"

"The next lesson," John stressed.

"Er, yes. Right." Sherlock made a show of folding his arms behind his back and pacing thoughtfully, taking the opportunity to shoot his kindred a series of deterrent glares while his back was turned to John.

They hushed themselves, probably less out of respect than wanting to see how things played out.

"The world is composed of the seen and the unseen," Sherlock started. He faced John again. "You and your kind breach that divide. As you've just experienced firsthand, the results are many and wondrous."

"What's on the other side?"

"Beings. Places. Forces that act on those things. Just like any world, really, but perhaps with a different rule set."

John tilted his head, unsure what exactly Sherlock was getting at.

"Take a chessboard, for example," Sherlock said. "The same plane is used for chess and draughts. Now imagine there are two games happening simultaneously: one chess, one draughts, but neither set can see nor touch the other. Then add special pieces. Crowned kings and knights and queens powerful enough to affect both games."

"That's us," John ventured.

Sherlock nodded. "That's us."

"So I'm going to see more things," John said. "Bigger things."

" _Much_ bigger things."

“What, like fairies?”

Sherlock fixed John with an insulted look. “Of course not. Calling one of the folk a ‘fairy’ is akin to saying a Scottish terrier is a quadruped. It describes nothing useful about it. Possibly you are referring to the _aes sídhe_ , whom anyone of even middling intelligence will strictly avoid.”

Those gathered of the folk sniggered playfully. They were quickly losing caution and beginning to float and skip and wander about the roof. Sherlock barely tolerated their mischief in the best of times, and now they were actively interfering in what might be his only shot at freedom for the foreseeable future.

"Are you certain you're all right?" John asked. He stepped closer to Sherlock, concerned, and the sylphs drifting about his feet glowed indecent shades of red.

Sherlock restrained himself admirably, under the circumstances. "I'm fine."

John glanced around, suspicious. "No, there's something here."

"It doesn't matter."

"I want to see it," John said, his voice hardening. "Tell me how."

"There's more to it than just—"

" _Sherlock_."

It was an order, not a request. John stared straight up at him with enough bull-headed resolve to crack open the sturdiest of the elder oaks, and for a fleeting second Sherlock believed he just might manage it. Sherlock's careful plan was disintegrating around him; six stages of four steps each, intended to gradually expose and encourage John's abilities while baiting his interest.

But if John was determined to skip right to the crux of Sherlock's dilemma, well, who was he to complain?

"All right," Sherlock said. "I'll show you."

John gave a self-satisfied smile and peered around at the nighttime skyline, as if he could simply turn his greensight on and off like night vision goggles. Sherlock took his hand, pulling him to the middle of the roof, and a few wayward sprites scattered in their wake, tittering gossip between themselves.

“Shall I close my eyes again?” John asked, hiding the remnants of his smile.

That didn’t sound like a bad idea at all, in Sherlock’s opinion, but the dying leaf in his pocket brought more practical considerations to bear.

“No," he said. "The last exercise was about looking within. You must now look without.”

John nodded and Sherlock placed his hands on John’s shoulders, centering his stance.

"Keep your eyes fixed on me and focus on your peripheral vision,” Sherlock instructed. “That's where you'll see them first: as snatches of movement and form. Most people ignore it when it happens. Your power of will is the key to unlocking the rest. Only you can do it for yourself."

Their gazes met and John was stubbornly unblinking, his brows creased slightly in concentration. The evening starlight cast his eyes darker than their natural shade. He looked fiercer, Sherlock thought. A force of nature quietly rumbling below the unassuming shell he hid himself behind. 

John’s eyes flickered briefly and his head began drifting to one side as he struggled to see without seeing. Sherlock gently nudged his chin back to center.

"Eyes on me, John. Don't look for them directly."

He was growing frustrated. Sherlock had witnessed druids spend months mastering basic skills like these, and here John thought he could accomplish it in minutes.

Sherlock lost himself in John’s eyes again. There was an energy there, crackling with readiness. He was a disciplined army doctor fresh from the horrors of war. If anyone could do it, it was John.

Palms on his shoulders, Sherlock set them into a slow rotation in hopes of encouraging the greensight. John moved fluidly to match Sherlock’s footsteps, never breaking his gaze.

"Let the feeling of an outside presence grow,” Sherlock said. “ _Know_ they are there."

“I don’t see anything,” John huffed.

“Choose it. Make it bend to you, not the other way around.”

The glint of tenacity in John’s eyes seemed to double in strength. Sherlock felt a strong tug at his coat and realized John had grabbed him by the lapels, and suddenly it was John setting the pace of their little spinning dance. A flush of heat flooded him from head to toe and he let himself be carried by John’s designs. They circled and circled, Sherlock blinking rapidly and trying to uphold his role as John’s point of focus. Awareness of the world shrank down to the instinctive synchrony of their movements, John’s eyes shining with the light of a thousand constellations, rending Sherlock to his basest self, and he could not have pulled away if he tried.

John abruptly brought them to a halt. He was taut as a wire, breathing heavily, hands fisted in Sherlock’s coat, and something seemed to be happening. Sherlock’s gaze dropped straight to John’s mouth, overwhelmed and overwarmed, quite certain that he’d never experienced the strange fluttering sensation blooming inside his chest. John had him, John was staring him down with heady intensity, aflame with rage and power and all the things that brought Sherlock’s kind to their knees—

A scraping sound from one of the larger folk passed behind Sherlock, and suddenly a sharp jab landed right behind his calves. Sherlock toppled forward into John, breaking his concentration in time to catch Sherlock with a remarkable display of reflexes. They hung there for a shocking moment, Sherlock’s heart thundering in pace with John’s, and whatever had come over Sherlock seemed to vanish in an instant.

"All right?" John asked breathlessly.

Sherlock quickly pushed himself away from John, regaining his balance, and coolly played off the warmth brought on by John holding him in his arms.

Sherlock cleared his throat. "They're getting impatient," he said, evasive. The culprit who had pushed him into John shuffled by – a bauchan, wearing a not-so-innocent grin, as if it were somehow helping to instigate a romantic liaison.

He looked up again, and John had frozen stock still.

“Sherlock,” he whispered. “There’s something on your shoulder.”

A loud, approving chirrup sounded next to Sherlock's ear. He turned his head to find a hob sitting exactly where John had described. Between the distraction of John and the routine frequency with which his smaller kindred treated him as a climbing frame, he hadn’t noticed its arrival.

Eyes wide, John reached out and ever so gently lifted the creature from its perch near Sherlock’s collar. It was a wee thing, coarse and woody like the scales of pine cone, with spindly limbs and a body tapered like peeling bark.

Its trilling turned to agitation as John continued to hold it. “Sorry,” John said, and quickly deposited it on the surface of the rooftop. The hob sprang back to the gathered crowd, and John jerked back a bit as he realized just how many of the folk had come to watch them, tiny eyes staring in fascination at the only greenseer they’d ever seen.

John backed up, bumping into Sherlock’s chest.

“It’s all right, John,” Sherlock said, lightly touching his sleeve. “They’re just curious.”

John glanced up at Sherlock. “Oh my God,” he said.

For a brief, rapturous moment, Sherlock’s traitor of a brain actually thought that John could see him, had looked up in wonder and spoken _Oh my God_ because he saw something more incredible than the twiggy, wispy, leafy bodies of the lesser folk. But John didn’t spare him more than a cursory glance before returning his eyes to the crowd, and Sherlock felt his hopes sink in equal measure to their rise.

“All right, you’ve got a good look at him,” Sherlock shouted. “Now _piss off_!”

Few of the lesser folk dared defy an incensed woodwose, so at Sherlock’s behest they scattered like the wind. In seconds it was just him and John on the rooftop again, alone with the discarded cane.

John, unbelievably, began to laugh. “That was _amazing_ ,” he said brightly. “Did you see them all? Christ, I’d think I'd been slipped something if you weren’t here to vouch for me.”

Sherlock hummed, his mood considerably darkened. Stupid, that; progress meant nothing if John did not strengthen his sight enough to see Sherlock's true form, but John had just advanced faster than Sherlock thought possible. On top of it all, Sherlock had been convinced of an innate physical attraction on John's part. There was no telling what he could do by sunrise. He had to have faith in John.

Sherlock looked over at John, his smile radiant as he examined his obsolete cane, and realized it was the easiest thing in the world to believe in John Watson.

The phone in Sherlock’s pocket chimed with an incoming text message. John glanced up, ready for whatever came next.

Sherlock began fishing out the phone. “That should be Lestrade with the search warrant,” he said.


	4. Chapter 4

London had come to life.

It was like a thin film had overlaid the city John knew and revealed a secondary world; tiny beings sheltering beneath crumbling drainages and weathered eaves, frolicking in the green spaces between the berms, watching and living and interacting as any other creatures might do.

As the cab brought them down to the Strand, Sherlock began naming the various kinds as John gaped out the window. Terms and titles swirled through John’s head, and he doubted he’d get them sorted any time soon. He asked about the bigger things, like nymphs and water-horses, but Sherlock made it clear he’d need to work harder to see those. The nymphs they’d encounter on their visit to the baths would provide ample opportunity to practice.

“It was a natural spring before being converted by the Romans,” Sherlock explained as they disembarked from the cab on Surrey Street. “Nymphs from all around came to bathe and… do whatever it is nymphs do.”

John handed over a few folded bills to the driver. “And what might that be?”

Sherlock stopped and scrunched his face in thought. “You know, I’ve never bothered to ask," he said. "Taunt travelers? Play tricks? What else is there to do when you can't be away from your pool for long?”

As the cab pulled away, John turned. "When I was at King's College, I heard more than a few stories about drunk philosophy students sneaking into the baths for a midnight skinny dip."

"No nymph deserves to be subjected to such displays of human vulgarity."

"I don't know about that. Some of the blokes belonged to my rugby club." John smiled fondly at the memories. "They were _quite_ fit."

Sherlock rolled his eyes and spun with a dramatic sweep of his coat. John chuckled as he followed him down the pavement, his bright mood due in no small part to his miraculously sturdy right leg. Sherlock had done what months of physical therapy failed to do for the nonexistent wound, and John wasn’t sure how he’d ever properly thank him for restoring his mobility.

As they walked, the evening breeze ruffled through Sherlock's curls, subverting his brisk and deliberate gait into something closer to amusing. John kept his smile to himself.

For all his pompous self-aggrandizing, Sherlock knew his stuff, and John found himself wondering how the detective fit into this brave new world. The transparent warping that surrounded him had worsened in a manner akin to a Dalí painting, bending light and color at angles that gave John secondhand discomfort. Lestrade took orders from him and the spirits on the roof had obeyed him at a word. Among the remarkable and fantastic, Sherlock was clearly special.

They passed under a gated brick archway and hung a right up a pedestrian street. When they reached number five, Sherlock knocked on the door nestled into the recesses of the stonework. A policewoman opened it and allowed them inside, and then it was a confusing labyrinth of worn stone stairwells and winding halls until they rounded a corner and found Lestrade waiting to intercept them, his expression nothing short of grim.

Sherlock stilled upon seeing Lestrade’s face. "Show me."

The DI nodded and led them through the final doorway. They emerged in an underground room with a tall stone ceiling, plastered an obnoxious white above chipped ceramic tiles. An oblong pool was set into the floor with a number of carved steps and metal hand railings. A window was fixed into one wall, letting the light from the street above cast a wedge of artificial yellow upon a scene of grotesque horror.

At least eight young women in long wispy dresses were sprawled throughout the room, some floating in the water, some half-draped over the edge of the pool, others crumpled along the floor.

"Nymphs," John said, managing to make it sound only half a question.

Sherlock steepled his fingers together and began a purposeful circuit of the room. The women bore an unearthly beauty like the nymph on the beach, their hair and skin tones a broad palette of colors.

"Haven't been dead long," Lestrade said. "Earlier this evening, by our estimation."

"Is this all of them?" Sherlock asked.

Lestrade nodded. "If there were more living here, they've scampered back down the plumbing. I don't blame them."

John approached the edge of the pool and peered down into it. The water was tinged a pale green from the mineral content. Two nymphs were floating, hair and dresses billowing wide, but something odd about the water itself caught John's attention. He knelt.

"John?" came Sherlock's voice.

It was difficult to make sense of it, but a living shadow seemed to flit and flicker beneath the surface of the water. John diverted all his concentration to the strange refractions. They intensified in darkness, spider-webbing throughout the water and down the man-made drainage wells, past two additional corpses, deep beneath the foundations and into the buried cisterns.

“These waters are blackened," John said, looking up. "There are two more dead nymphs down below.”

Across the room, Sherlock frowned. His pale eyes danced over the scene, pinging with thoughts too quick for John to follow, until all at once they stilled.

Sherlock went to the nearest drainage grate and leaned down to reach inside. He lifted out a clump of white berries, holding it gingerly by the stem. The berries were punctured and the leaves shredded.

“Christ,” Lestrade gasped.

Sherlock hummed, raising the berries for inspection. “Devil’s fuge. More commonly known as mistletoe.”

John clambered to his feet. “Mistletoe did this?”

“It’s deadly to the folk,” Lestrade explained.

Sherlock nodded in agreement. “Favored by the druids and adopted by the Christians. Why do you think the early pagans hung it at wintertide? They feared the folk and used it to ward them off.”

“So it was a human who poisoned them?” John said.

Sherlock dropped the berries and wiped his hand on his coat. “Not necessarily. Lestrade, have you heard anything from your contacts?”

The DI shrugged. “Rumors, really. Out-of-towner. Moves by night or not at all.”

“Who kills with mistletoe and makes a clean job of it,” Sherlock said, clasping his hands thoughtfully behind his back. “No loose ends. Brutal methodology. The air here, it’s tainted, did you notice? Faintly smells of wood smoke and soot.”

Lestrade looked up with concern. “Are you thinking…”

Sherlock nodded. “A barghest, I’d say.”

“A what?” John cut in.

Sherlock spread his arms wide to demonstrate size. “Barghest. Takes the form of a big black dog with gigantic teeth and a bad attitude.”

John raised his eyebrows at Lestrade. “He’s serious?”

“Let’s just say they’re not often invited round for tea,” said Lestrade.

“They’re solitary creatures,” Sherlock went on. “Often found wandering moors and old ruins, especially at night. Don’t think I’ve ever heard of one making a trip to a population center of any significant density.”

Lestrade and Sherlock traded meaningful glances.

“You ought to tell him,” Lestrade said.

Sherlock sighed deeply.

John was at a total loss as to what they were talking about. “Tell me what? Sherlock?”

He turned toward John, hesitant. “I strongly suspect that you’re its target, John. These nymphs were killed for information. Death by mistletoe is fast and painful, but if done with care can be prolonged for hours. In this case, by means of dilution in water.”

“They were tortured,” John realized. “To get to me? Why?”

“The druids of long ago were not friends of the folk,” Sherlock said, his expression hardening. “They had power and they knew it. There was much suffering brought upon our kin. Your presence threatens those who fear a return to those times.”

Lestrade shot Sherlock a grimace. “The barghest must know by now that John’s with you. It’s not difficult to narrow it down.”

“Why’s that?” John asked.

He seemed surprised at the question. “Everyone’s heard about Sherlock,” Lestrade said. “From the Hebrides to the Isle of Man and on down to Dover. Everyone.”

“Lestrade,” Sherlock warned. “Enough.”

John pressed a hand to his forehead. Sherlock was famous, apparently, and was it because he worked as a detective? But Lestrade held the same job and—Christ, no, he shouldn’t be worrying about that. He was standing in a room full of nymphs who’d died horribly because of him.

“We can’t let this thing kill anyone else,” John said to Sherlock. “There must be a way to trap it, or frighten it away, or—or _something_.”

Sherlock shook his head. “It won’t stop until it’s found what it’s looking for.”

Left hand clenching into an automatic fist, John kept his gaze even. “Then how do we stop it? Permanently?”

Sherlock looked at him for a time, eyes skirting over his stiff posture and the unmistakable intent written in his face. John was new to this strange world of demon dogs and greensight and spirit folk, but he’d never run from an honest threat in his life, and he wasn’t about to start.

By the softening of Sherlock’s gaze, he knew it, too.

"Lestrade, keep your feelers out,” he suddenly said, not taking his eyes off John. “Let us know if you get word on its lair, or at least a solid location. Warn everyone, and I mean _everyone_. Above ground and below. This thing has no qualms about killing.”

The tone of Sherlock’s voice stirred a delicious flicker of adrenaline at the base of John’s spine. “What about us?”

“I'm taking you to Baker Street until I can figure out what to do,” Sherlock said.

John’s fingers curled around empty air, anxious for the cold weight of a pistol grip. “I’ll need to stop at my flat on the way.”

 

* * *

 

John relaxed once he had the comforting bulk of his handgun stuffed down the back of his jeans. Sherlock considered informing him that the weapon was all but useless against a member of the folk, but his restored confidence was preferable to panic for the time being.

“Have you ever met a barghest?” John asked as the cab sped them toward Baker Street. It was probably unwise to take John there, as the beast surely had learned the location of Sherlock’s home, but it was the only protection Sherlock could provide.

“Once,” he said. “Long ago.”

John stopped short of asking how long that might be. Sherlock saw the question in his eyes.

He’d gladly tell John more, but the mystery was all he had working in his favor. John was attracted and intrigued so long as Sherlock strung him along with strategic tidbits of non-information. The truth, inevitably, would end whatever fancy John had built up in his head.

That was fine. Sherlock only needed his attention to last the night. What John did after Sherlock’s release was his own prerogative.

The thought weighted his chest with an unexpected heaviness. Sherlock shut it out as best he could.

But then John caught his eye again, the look there conveying solemn reassurance that their combined efforts were enough to handle any danger they might face, and Sherlock felt the weight in his chest expand rather than recede.

It would be for the best when John left his side. For everyone.

When the cab finally slowed to a stop, Sherlock all but bounded from the claustrophobic interior.

He froze on the pavement only a second later.

The door to 221B had been vandalized. Gigantic claw marks rent the black wood in long jagged lines, exposing the pale interior pulp. The brass numbers hung by thick splinters and the knocker had been torn clean off.

“My God,” John said as he joined him.

Sherlock went up to touch the shredded wood. “It seems our friend has already come looking.”

“These are deep,” John pointed out. “He could have broken the entire thing if he’d wanted.”

“No, my precautions prevented him from getting inside.” He looked at John. “This is a statement of intent.”

The lock was still intact. Sherlock inserted his key and allowed the door to swing open, wobbling a bit on its hinges. Sherlock cautiously stepped into the dark entry hall.

A heavy object whizzed through the air and Sherlock barely ducked in time for it fly right over his head. There was a metallic clang against the wallpaper and a surprised “Oh!”, and the hall light abruptly switched on.

Mrs. Hudson stood before him clutching a cast iron frying pan, her apron spotty with grease stains.

“Sherlock!” she exclaimed, lowering her pan in surprise. “Thank heaven you’re here! You can’t imagine the growling I heard—oh! Horrible sounds.”

“It’s all right. It’s just us,” Sherlock told her.

Mrs. Hudson tilted to see past him. “Us? Who’s that there?”

Sherlock turned to find John only a step behind him, gun drawn and aimed directly at Mrs. Hudson.

“Might I introduce John Watson,” he said. “John, this is Mrs. Hudson. My housekeeper.”

“Landlady,” she corrected. “We decided it’s landlady now. Remember, dear?”

“Yes, whatever,” Sherlock sighed, stepping aside to usher John inside.

John lowered his weapon and did an admirable job of hiding his puzzlement. Mrs. Hudson smiled pleasantly at him, no worse for wear after being threatened with a firearm, and John slid his gun back into his trousers as he crossed the threshold. Sherlock closed the door behind him, restoring the protective barrier.

“How long ago was it here?” Sherlock asked.

“Oh, an hour or two,” said Mrs. Hudson. “That’s when it did the door, there, you see. I think it came round again because I heard sniffing after a while.”

“Searching for a weakness,” Sherlock murmured.

“I don’t understand,” John said. “It killed all those nymphs. Shouldn’t it have broken in and killed her too?”

Sherlock shook his head. “Mrs. Hudson is a hamadryad. She has total control over her bonded tree, and that includes who’s allowed inside.”

John glanced suspiciously around at the walls. “This is a tree?”

“Oh, no, dear,” explained Mrs. Hudson. “They cut that down ages ago. But they left the roots beneath the foundations, so here I am.”

John’s brows creased in genuine disgust. “That’s awful.”

“That’s life,” she said, and her expression brightened. “Oh, you should have seen it! Biggest oak you’ve ever laid eyes on. Leaves the size of dinner plates and boughs stronger than iron—”

Mrs. Hudson paused, staring at John as if she’d suddenly realized he wasn’t just another open ear for her ramblings. “Hold on. You’re him, aren’t you?”

John blinked. “Him?”

“The one everyone’s talking about. Mrs. Turner next door, she’s been on and on about the druid in town.”

“I’m not a druid,” John said.

“You’re as good as, for most of the folk. I knew more than a few in my time. Nasty people. And after what they did to Sherlock!” She fixed John with a look of profound curiosity. “You know, you don’t remind me of them at all.”

John opened his mouth to say something but Sherlock quickly intervened. “That’s enough hysterics for one night, I think,” Sherlock said, pushing him toward the stairs. “We’ve got pressing business to attend. This way, John.”

“Jesus, all right,” John complained. He traded an odd glance between them before turning and starting upward.

Mrs. Hudson tugged on Sherlock’s sleeve before he could follow. She looked positively gleeful.

“Oh, he’s a darling, Sherlock, isn’t he?” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m so happy for you.”

One hand on the banister, Sherlock glared coolly. “Mrs. Hudson, today, more than any other day, _do_ shut up.”

She giggled and mimed a zipping motion across her mouth. “I’ll be down here if you two need anything!”

John was in the sitting room when Sherlock got up to the flat. He’d removed his coat and draped it over the red easy chair, the one meant for guests and clients, and was examining the disheveled belongings strewn about the room. Trimmed boughs from a dozen different species of tree protruded from the books and papers. On the desk, a range of amber sap samples were set onto slides, waiting for a free hour at the microscope. A collection of curiously shaped stones lined the window sills and a set of disfigured bulbs were stacked in pots for future analysis.

John’s face was neutral as he looked around, but Sherlock felt a stab of self-consciousness. It was absurd; he’d never cared what people thought about his residence. Somehow, John’s approval carried unspeakable significance.

Attempting to look nonchalant, Sherlock circled to his chair and took a seat with steepled fingers. He needed to think things through, to plot and plan his next move. The barghest was searching for them, and as stubborn as Mrs. Hudson might be, the defenses of a hamadryad were not impenetrable. Dealing with a barghest required careful forethought and no small amount of ingenuity.

But Sherlock’s gaze kept drifting to John as he moved about the sitting room. When he first began planning the evening’s seduction, he’d considered the possibility of luring John to Baker Street and bedding him, if necessary. Humans were a sentimental race, especially after intercourse, and Sherlock had been prepared to sham his way through almost anything to gain his freedom.

The thought of bedding John now brought a flush of heat to his cheeks. Shamming was out of the question.

John gravitated toward the mantelpiece, where a lidless box held a few small shards of bronze.

“What are these?” John asked.

“Relics,” Sherlock said. “From the nemetons.”

He picked up one of the pieces, turning it in his fingers. Time and wear had stolen the metal’s luster, but in John’s hands it seemed to regain some of its old shine. “Nemetons?”

“The most powerful and sacred of the groves, many of which no longer exist.” Sherlock rose to join John by the fireplace. “My brother Mycroft brings me these, on occasion. They’re all that remains of the druids.”

“What happened to them?”

Sherlock had heard about the breaking of the bands. At the time, he’d have given anything to join in the destruction. “Things changed, and they did not. The nemetons served as the sites of their final stand.”

John’s eyes were on the worked bronze in his hands, as if it were speaking to him from across the ages. “Could you take me?” he asked, voice gone soft.

It wasn’t a bad idea. A nemeton might be just the thing to give John’s sight the final push.

“The last of the nemetons in London were destroyed long ago,” Sherlock told him. “The closest is a considerable distance.”

There were lesser groves, but none that supplied the sort of power John needed. Sherlock would have to send John with Mycroft, perhaps, or one of the few remaining dryads within the city limits.

But with a barghest on the loose and John square in its sights, Sherlock was hesitant to trust anyone with his burgeoning greenseer. And there was sunrise to consider. He’d never make it back in time.

John looked up at him, still waiting for an answer to his request, and in the moment Sherlock wanted nothing more. He wanted to be the one to bring John to a nemeton, to watch his face light up with wonder at the beauty of Sherlock’s world. He wanted to share it with John, everything he’d been forced to keep hidden from the small-minded humans who breathed and stacked and choked the life from their sylvan inheritance. He wanted to see John come into his power and emerge all the brighter, more radiant than the sun.

“I’ll take you there, if you like,” Sherlock lied.

John’s smile was worth it. Trapped in London, Sherlock would never visit a nemeton again.

John returned the piece of bronze to its place among the others, touching them for a thoughtful moment, before meeting his gaze again.

“Sherlock, what did the druids do to you?”

Sherlock felt his jaw clench. Damn Mrs. Hudson and her insufferable mouth. He’d hoped John had missed that particular detail.

“Nothing with which you need be concerned,” Sherlock said.

John’s expression grew pained. “If it’s to do with me, with what I am—”

Sherlock cut him off with an abrupt wave. “You’re not to blame for anything they’ve done, John. They are dead and gone and you are nothing like them.”

John wrestled with that. He swallowed the lies so easily, but when it came to matters of absolute truth, he wasn’t nearly as obliging. Sherlock held back a frown. Grouping John among a heathen order marked by self-absorbed indifference was offensive. Someone like him might have made all the difference, ages ago.

When John spoke again, he looked no closer to believing it. “Well,” he said, clearing his throat and moving to the red armchair. “All the same, I’m glad they’re no more.”

“Me, too,” Sherlock muttered under his breath.

John settled into the seat and folded his hands expectantly. He looked like he belonged there. “So. The barghest?”

“I was just thinking on it,” Sherlock said, pensively pressing his fingertips together.

John glanced around at the room. “If what you said about Mrs. Hudson is true, I don’t see why we can’t stay here.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You think four man-made walls and an aging hamadryad will keep us safe?”

John shrugged. “It’s worked so far.”

Sherlock turned toward him. “Then allow me to enlighten you.”

The fire buffeted in the hearth, shrinking to a meager fraction of its size. It was cheap theatricality on Sherlock’s part, but John’s eyes went wide.  

“It will find a way in before the night is through, either by its own means or through coercion of one of my kin. Once it finds us, we’re as good as dead.” Sherlock loomed over John’s seated form, casting him in shadow. “I imagine it will kill me first, in the event I try to throw any last minute spanners into the works. It’ll be quick, what with gutting knives for claws and fangs honed to razor-sharpness, and it won’t bother to wait until I’ve died before turning its sights on you. Barghests hunt for sport, did you know? It will enjoy killing you, John. Slowly, carefully, with every bit of malice it has carried toward your kind.”

John worked his mouth a few times before finding his voice. “You haven’t any means to control it?”

Sherlock shook his head. “I am nothing to this creature. I have a few tricks up my sleeve, but there is an order, a hierarchy. Within London’s bounds, I fear the only thing that can stop it is a druid.”

John didn’t hesitate. He stood to face Sherlock, the steel returned to his eyes. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

For someone who had only a short while ago denied affiliation with his ancient brethren, John demonstrated keen interest in the mantle when it promised actionable ends. He was both considerably brave and considerably stupid to offer himself. Disconcertingly, it seemed a combination which Sherlock had come to favor. The hearth fire flared back to life, burning brighter than before.

“A druid, John,” Sherlock said. “Trained and tested.”

“I’m as good as. Mrs. Hudson said so herself.”

“You’re a raw greenseer who only just met his first sprite. I’ve passed on the basics of your trade, but there are charms, invocations. Things of which I’ve no knowledge and no way to teach you.”

John’s brows drew together as he gestured toward the shelves. “There’s got to be something. You’ve dozens of books here—”

“Written _after_ the time of the druids,” Sherlock heatedly argued. “They’re academic at best.”

“Then let’s find out,” John shot back. “Give me something to try.”

Sherlock gave him a dark look. “I’m not allowing you to read undocumented verse.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re more powerful than you know, and I won’t risk you!” Sherlock boomed.

The words reverberated in silence between them. John’s eyes were blazing and Sherlock felt an overpowering urge to lean in and kiss him, delicate politics of seduction be damned. By the dilation of his pupils, John would not oppose such an attempt. But John was an idiot with no comprehension of the vastness of his potential. He was lightning in a thunderstorm, molten stone erupting, the crash of angry tides against a cliff. Sherlock wanted to kiss sense into his stubborn mouth and _make him understand_.

The clearing of a throat snapped the momentary tension. Sherlock’s head shot up and he saw Mycroft standing in the doorway of the flat, umbrella tucked under one arm.

“Apologies if I’ve interrupted the inaugural domestic,” Mycroft said. He was affecting boredom, but his grip on his umbrella handle gave the game away. He’d come out of misplaced concern.

Sherlock turned away in disgust, masking fear that he had just played his hand too openly. “John, my brother Mycroft.”

“I saw the barghest is wasting no time,” Mycroft said, striding casually into the room. “Shame about the door, but I can’t say I much cared for the choice of color to begin with.”

Sherlock retreated to his chair and erected a defense of steepled fingers, the near-miss with John still heating in his face. John was oddly rigid where he stood, eyes locked onto Mycroft as the flush receded down the back of his neck.

Mycroft evaluated John with cold dispassion. “Well, greenseer. What is it you see?”

John swallowed and blinked. “Sorry?”

He arched an eyebrow. “You’re looking right at me, aren’t you? You must see something. Are you a greenseer or not?”

The antagonism in Mycroft’s tone swiftly replaced the discomfort in John’s stance with a guarded defiance. His mouth tightened and he fixed Mycroft with a steady glare.

“Well?” Mycroft prodded.

“I don’t see why I should tell you anything,” John said.

They looked at each other for a tense stretch of time until Mycroft finally nodded, expression settling into placid approval. “You’ve got mettle, Doctor Watson. You’ll need it in the days to come. See that you don’t lose it.”

John gaped for a moment as Mycroft stepped past him, confused enough to shoot Sherlock a questioning glance. Sherlock lifted his eyebrows and shrugged faintly.

“Gregory informed me what happened,” Mycroft said, eyes flicking over the red armchair. He glanced at John. “I believe you’ve met DI Lestrade. My paramour.”

“The water-horse?” John asked, surprised.

“Kelpie,” Mycroft corrected.

John shook his head. “I can’t imagine what that’s like.”

Raising his chin, Mycroft smirked politely. “Can’t you?”

Sherlock launched from his chair to intervene in the dangerous turn the conversation had taken. “Are you here to help with the barghest problem, then, or just to torture us by referencing your sex life?”

“No need to get worked up,” Mycroft advised, irritatingly amused. “I’m here to aid you however I can. Sherlock, join me in the kitchen, won’t you?”

Sherlock went with grudging reluctance, if only to separate Mycroft from John. His brother leaned on his umbrella beside the refrigerator, barely containing his horrid smile.

“I didn’t derail anything back there, did I?” he said. “So sorry.”

Sherlock folded his arms. “I’ve more pressing concerns than taking a page from your recreational pursuits.”

“Really? The way you were staring at each other, I didn’t wonder if you intended to copulate right there in front of me.”

Rolling his eyes, Sherlock seriously weighed the ramifications of tossing his brother out the kitchen window. “Tell me again why I’m wasting my time talking to you?”

“I had planned to convince you to abandon the greenseer for the sake of self-preservation. Throw him on the streets. The barghest will claim his prize and doubtlessly leave you alone.” Sherlock opened his mouth to argue and Mycroft raised a hand, cutting him off. “Don’t bother. I realized it was a futile gesture the moment I walked in.”

Sherlock glared at him.

“I meant what I said,” Mycroft went on. “I’m here to help, much as it pains you, so you can tell me the state of things or I can go ask him.”

Sherlock took a long breath, relenting. “John’s sight remains weak. He can’t see much beyond the lesser folk. At the rate we're going, he won't develop in time for sunrise. Not if we have to waste hours fending off a barghest, as well.”

“I suppose anything I might recommend to deal with the beast has already crossed your mind, so I shan’t bother with that.” Mycroft tapped his umbrella thoughtfully against the floor. “As for your greenseer, it sounds simple enough. You have a choice, little brother. Spend your remaining hours teaching him and charming him for your own benefit, probably at the cost of his life once the barghest discovers you, or you may devote your energies entirely to protecting him and see that he survives the night.”

It was the decision on the fringes of Sherlock’s mind since he’d learned of the barghest on their trail. John needed time and concentration if he had any hope of seeing Sherlock’s true form. Sherlock needed time to cement his manipulations and convince John he was feeling love rather than lust. Their odds of obtaining that time were hysterically microscopic. So, he could instead do as Mycroft suggested, and focus his every resource to keeping John alive.

There was a trade-off to be made, and the worst part of all was that Sherlock knew exactly which side he was on.

A profound heaviness sank in his chest as he resigned himself to a lifetime segregated from the green woodlands of his youth. Never again to feel the fresh wind off a crag, to watch the dapples of sunlight dance in a meadow stream, to relish the damp soil clinging to one’s pelt after a good romp. He was losing the rushing harmony of rivers swollen after the spring thaw. Walking beneath towering tree limbs, draped with moss in the early morning fog. Following gold-flecked pollinators as they harvested a field of wildflowers.

John was more important than all that.

“He can’t stay here,” Sherlock decided. “A grove. Any grove, as small as they come. He’ll be safer there. Stronger.”

His brother’s face had lost all pretenses. “Oh, Sherlock,” he softly said. “You’ve fallen quite hard, haven’t you?”

Sherlock refused to give him the satisfaction of the obvious answer. “Are you going to help me, or not?”

Ten minutes later, Mycroft was departing down the steps of 221B as Sherlock filled a rack of his test tubes from the kitchen sink. He stoppered each of them and carried the whole apparatus back into the sitting room, where John was waiting with a worried crease between his eyes.

“What are we doing?” John asked.

Sherlock placed the rack of tubes on table, pushing a pile of loose papers aside. “You’re going to consecrate this water.”

“How?”

Going to the nearest bookcase, Sherlock skimmed through the titles until he found the one he needed. He pulled out the decaying leather-bound book and turned, slamming it on the table and flipping it open to the correct entry. John scanned the page before looking up, confused.

“It’s Old English,” Sherlock told him. “Just say it. You needn’t understand the words.”

“I don’t recognize half these letters,” John said.

Sherlock sighed and rotated the book around. “What do they teach in school these days?”

“Languages that people _actually_ speak, for starters.”

“Plenty of people speak Old English,” Sherlock reasoned. “ _I_ speak Old English.”

“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure that’s because you were around at the time,” John muttered, mostly to himself.

“Fine. I’ll say it aloud, and you repeat after me,” Sherlock said.  

They consecrated each vial in turn, with excruciating slowness. John’s pronunciations left much to be desired, and though the blessing was short it required many repetitions before John got it exactly right. There were six in total, and Sherlock split the number between him and John.

“Will these stop the barghest?” John asked as he slid his vials into his coat pocket.

Sherlock glanced out the front window to ensure the cab he’d ordered was waiting outside. “The blessed water will hurt it,” he said. “Applying it directly to the eyes, into the mouth, or introducing it to the bloodstream might be enough to kill it. We only need to fend it off long enough to get you into the grove at Hampstead Heath. Once there, the grove will augment your abilities and you’ll consecrate one of the streams, which should do the job quite nicely.”

“You expect me to remember that whole blessing?”

Sherlock sighed and went to the book on the table, ripping out the page and handing it to John.

John looked skeptical as he folded it up and placed it into his coat. “So we’ll sit in a blessed stream until the barghest decides to take a dip and die?”

“That’s the general idea,” Sherlock said as they started down the stairs. “Mycroft’s summoning backup from out of town in case the barghest catches on. You might be in there for a while, but we’ll take care of it.”

There was no sign of the beast outside. It had rained since they got there, and Sherlock urged John toward the cab as he locked the mauled door behind them.

As he was turned away, Sherlock pulled the oak leaf from his coat pocket. What had once been soft and new at the beginning of the night was largely brown and crisp. Only the stem bore any green, but that too was discoloring into a sickly muted yellow as dawn marched closer.

He wondered, for a moment, who possibly had the power to stop its cursed changing. Perhaps that person didn’t exist. Perhaps that person would _never_ exist.

An evening's hope had nearly convinced him otherwise. Stupid, idiotic belief fit for storybooks and children. He knew now that there was only one person capable of putting an end to it: Sherlock himself.

Sherlock cracked the leaf clean in half and let the pieces drop to the wet pavement.

If it wasn’t to be John, it would be no one at all.


	5. Chapter 5

A pale glow on the eastern horizon blotted out the stars above Hampstead Heath, but between the canopy of tree limbs churning in the night wind and the thick-timbered copse surrounding them, John thought it bloody dark enough.

There weren’t any torches. Sherlock said their night vision was more reliable, and that was about the only thing he’d said during the tense ride over. John spent the ride with one hand in his pocket, gripping the vials Sherlock had given him and bracing himself for the barghest to knock over the cab and claw its way through the steel frame.

But they reached the base of Parliament Hill without any trouble, leaving them to trudge the rest of the way on foot. As soon as they entered the parkland, something to the north began to beckon John. 

“I can feel it,” John called. "The grove."

Sherlock tramped ahead of him at inhuman speeds, hardly deterred by the dark. “It's in the Kenwood, just beyond the south meadow.”

Off to the left, the rising wind stirred the surface of a pond, rippling with reflections of the sky. Sherlock slipped easily between the silhouetted trees. John blindly followed until they emerged onto a proper park path.

It was then that John noticed the unnatural silence pervading the wood.

He stopped Sherlock. “Wait,” John said. “Where have all the spirits gone?”

At that moment, a subsonic vibration rolled over him like an autumn chill. The sound was so low it seemed to reverberate through his very bones, setting joints to rattle and tendons to creak as it shivered over the surface of his skin.

It ended as abruptly as it had begun. John looked at Sherlock, shaken. “What was that?”

“The call of a barghest,” Sherlock said. “This way.”

They flew off the path and into the trees, dodging rills and gullies in the dense vegetation. As he ran, John fumbled for his gun and a vial of blessed water. The uneven ground jolted the glass from his grasp,  losing it to the dark, and he cursed as he drew out a second.

They burst from the tree line into open heath. The warm presence of the grove was growing sharper in John’s awareness.

Sherlock suddenly locked step in front of him, freezing in the middle of the field. John reeled to a stop.

“What are you doing?” John shouted. “Come on!”

Sherlock’s face was contorted in concentration. He was paralyzed in mid-stride, feet planted firmly on the ground, but for all his obvious effort he didn’t budge an inch.

“I can’t,” Sherlock gasped.

“What are you talking about? We’re nearly there.”

Sherlock managed to look over at him. “Go on, John.”

It took a second for John to register what Sherlock was asking him to do. “I’m not leaving you. Not with that thing on our trail!”

“I can’t go any farther,” Sherlock said. “I got you as close as I could, but this is where it ends. The rest is up to you.”

A knot of fear tightened in John’s chest. Sherlock’s words made no sense at all. The grove was just over the hill, an inviting beacon pulsing in the back of John’s brain.

But the truth was in the steady finality of Sherlock’s gaze. He wasn’t putting on a ruse.

John gave a terse nod, raising his gun. “Then I’m staying here with you.”

Sherlock’s expression wilted. “John, _please_. Get out of here.”

“I’m not leaving you,” he said again.

Their eyes met, and John experienced a flood of adrenaline. He was probably about to die alongside a mythical being he’d barely known for one night on pitch-black public parkland with only a gun and a bit of magicked water to defend them.

Somehow, it was everything he hadn’t realized he’d missed. Not an escape from the extraordinary, but a return to it.

And if Sherlock was anything, he was the most extraordinary person John had ever met. If the barghest was going to kill John, well, the least he could do was try to keep Sherlock safe in the process.

“I’ll stand a better chance with you anyway,” John said, tightly controlling his voice as he snapped the gun’s slide to check the barrel. “I can’t see the bloody thing.”

He got a small smirk out of Sherlock. Was it appreciation in his eyes? John had caused him nothing but hassle and a significant amount of danger since the Criterion, and… Christ, that seemed days ago, not hours. John hoped the evening had at least lived up to Sherlock’s definition of ‘interesting’.

John pushed at Sherlock until he managed a few sluggish, backward steps under his own power. His joints loosened with each step, proving he could still walk, but he didn’t again try to breach the spot where he’d been halted.

“Should we keep moving?” John asked.

“No point. Open space is our only advantage.” Sherlock turned his head, one sharp cheekbone profiled against the strengthening glow of dawn.  “I don’t want you tripping.”

The rushes billowed in the wind and John angled his gun into the dark, keeping his back to Sherlock. He pulled his second vial with his free hand, popping the stopper and sliding his thumb over the opening. The accuracy of his release meant the difference between deterring the barghest and meeting a violent death.

The soul-shuddering vibration that marked the barghest’s call descended over John again, this time accompanied by the smell of soot and cinders. He shivered as Sherlock said, “It’s here.”

He searched hard for any sign of movement. Shrubs and grasses fluttered in the breeze, but either his sight was too poor or—

“To the west!” Sherlock shouted.

John spun on his heel, the grip of his gun rigid in his right hand. Sherlock was several meters away, hovering indistinctly around a stand of alder. John caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye and turned again. Something was out there on the heath.

It was like tracking the shimmer of a mirage by night vision; one moment he thought he had it in his sights, the next it was gone, or nothing but the wind in the grass. John swung his gun from left to right, struggling to find a target.

“I can’t see it,” John said, readying the vial of water in his fist. “Not entirely.”

He saw Sherlock reaching into the pocket of his coat, presumably to get one of his own vials, but in an instant he dropped and rolled, dodging toward the brush, and an enormous distortion blurred every leaf and twig. There came a growl like a glacier breaking, causing the ground beneath John’s feet to tremble.

In a surge of panic, John started running. “Sherlock!”

He chucked his vial directly at the blurry form. It spiraled through the air and there came a sound of glass smashing against a solid object. But the blessed water hadn’t struck anywhere that might harm the creature, because the thick-leaved boughs violently tore apart as if caught in a hurricane.

Sherlock screamed then, and John made out a spray of blood in the waxing light.

“ _Sherlock!_ ”

He neared the brush line, heart drumming, desperately searching for where Sherlock had landed and scrabbling for his last vial. John barely got it unstoppered before the leaves thrashed again; the distorted shape launched toward him and John flung the water out of instinct. The arc of liquid crossed its path only a moment too late, spattering harmlessly into the leaves, and John was knocked to ground.

John quickly stumbled upright. Sherlock wasn’t anywhere in the immediate vicinity. He kept his eyes up and trained on the surroundings, but the barghest had receded into the dimness.

He needed to see it. He’d used up the water, but he stood absolutely no chance in poor light against what he couldn’t see.

John drew a long, steady breath to slow his heart rate. He leveled his stance and concentrated on the periphery of his vision. Sherlock wasn’t there to focus on, so he fixed his sights on the dark outline of an oak in the distance, bending every inch of his willpower toward looking without looking.

The distortion streaked across the heath and John pulled the trigger twice in quick succession. The muzzle flashes were blindingly bright and John heard a sharp, grating squeal, but if one of the rounds had struck the barghest, it hadn’t done anything to stop it.

As John centered his eyes on the oak tree to try again, he caught a sliver of light glinting in the grass. John reached down and his fingers closed around smooth, tubular glass.

Jesus, it was one of the vials.

He could try to toss it again, but that hadn’t proven an effective strategy. He needed a guaranteed delivery method. What had Sherlock said? Eyes, mouth, blood. There was only one means at his disposal capable of striking those.

John tore off the stopper with his teeth and doused his gun with the consecrated water.

He raised the weapon and waited, heels of his hands dripping. The barghest rumbled into the wind. The sound seemed to surround him, coming from every direction at once, and John gave his sight one last shot.

Believing the barghest existed was not the problem. It came, then, to the distinction between believing a thing and knowing it.

John closed his eyes as Sherlock’s scream echoed though his memory. It had done that. It had done that and Sherlock was bleeding out in the grass for all John knew. He was injured and in pain. The barghest had done that.

Fresh anger seethed in the pit of John’s stomach. It torrented up like a hot typhoon, rushing through him in an undiluted storm of primal aggression. His focus constricted down to a razor-sharp barb and unleashed a fearsome totality of control.

Sherlock needed his protection, and John refused to let another living thing touch him, of this world or any other.

John opened his eyes. And then John _saw_.

An enormous black beast with a coat like smoke and shadow was prowling toward him, great fangs shining wetly within its hideous snarl. Its eyes glowed ember-red, and its haunches would easily tower over the roof of any cab.

When it realized John was staring right at it, the barghest lifted its great canine snout and released a terrible, heart-splitting howl into the sky. The very air shook with the unearthly sound, and the barghest lowered its head and bounded straight toward him.

But John had found the eye of his fury. He calmly lifted his gun and fired three shots.

When the rounds hit home this time, it was like steam erupting into the cool morning air. The barghest made a noise like twisting steel and collapsed to the ground, its great mass tumbling once or twice before coming to a decided rest. John kept his gun raised and slowly approached.

The beast’s eyes had extinguished like hot coals, lightly smoking in their sockets. Its shape rippled with shadow. John shot it once more for good measure. Directly in the heart, if it had such a thing.

Something was wedged between the wicked claws of its gargantuan front paws. John reached down and pulled out a small piece of twig stuck between the keratin.

The leaf was crushed into a dark green pulp, but there was no mistaking the partial piece of mashed white berry. Mistletoe.

John stared at it numbly and glanced down again. Crimson streaks of blood stained the barghest’s claws.

The sound of Sherlock groaning nearby brought him back to reality. John tore to his feet, stowing his damp gun back beneath into his jeans, and crashed through the undergrowth until he spotted a dark shape amongst the ground cover.

“Sherlock!” he called.

Sherlock was on his stomach and moving slightly. He twisted his head round upon hearing his name, accompanied by a small grunt. John fell to his knees beside Sherlock and gently rolled him over.

When John saw the damage, he cursed beneath his breath. Three great claw marks had torn into Sherlock’s side. They weren’t all that deep, but the blood had already soaked through Sherlock’s shirt and into his coat. Dregs of leaf and berry smeared the edges of the cloth.

Sherlock’s eyes were bright and glassy, and his breathing uneven. “Is it dead?” he asked.

“I took care of it,” John told him, hands groping in the low light to gauge the extent of his injury. “Sherlock, its claws were covered in mistletoe.”

Sherlock hissed sharply at John’s touch. “I noticed.”

John focused hard, bending his sight to his will as he had with the barghest. It wasn’t seeing, exactly, but he made out the lines of poison coursing through Sherlock’s bloodstream. This was nothing like proper medicine; it was eating away at his essence, devouring him from the inside. Sherlock was fading from the world. Dying.

John swallowed and looked up at him. “Is there an antidote? Who can I go to? Just tell me who to find.”

Sherlock briefly closed his eyes and shook his head.

“There’s got to be something. I can’t– It’s not—”

“John,” Sherlock murmured, and his tone said it all. There was nothing to be done.

John was at a loss for words. He sat back on his heels and watched the poison working its route, blackening Sherlock’s veins the way it had blackened the nymph’s pool. He couldn’t fix something soul-deep. He didn’t know how.

Sherlock’s eyes were pale in the oncoming light of dawn. He watched the sky, shifting in tempered golds as the sun neared the horizon, before finding John’s gaze.

“John,” he said with some difficulty. “Can you… can you see me?”

Brows furrowing, John brushed back a strand of Sherlock’s hair. “Of course I see you, you great idiot,” he said. “You’re right here.”

Disappointment clouded Sherlock’s eyes. “I wanted it to be you,” he said, voice growing faint.

His face had gone deathly pale and for a stinging moment John refused to believe it. He wasn’t ready to give him up. John touched his cheek, futilely trying to keep him coherent. “Sherlock. Sherlock, _no_ , don’t do this...”

Sherlock blinked at him, slow.

John latched onto that tiny remnant of awareness. His throat grew tight and hot. “You were going to show me the ancient places, remember? You were going to lead me where I needed to go.”

He was slipping. John felt it, like a tide rushing out from under his feet. He gathered Sherlock in his arms and fought with everything he had, pinning him there, to life, with naught but his determination to prevent the passing. John held Sherlock in his mind’s eye, blocking out the cool dawn breeze and the streaks of sunlight cresting over the treetops. Nothing but Sherlock in his beautiful entirety, denying the universe the right to take him.

But the universe was stronger than one man, and despite John’s best efforts, Sherlock poured from his grasp like a thousand grains of sand. The strands of his life frayed apart, too complex for John to weave back together. John was on the brink of losing him, the one person that had ever made him feel right, feel at home, feel part of something greater than his own solitary existence.

John pressed their foreheads together, and though the shutting of his eyes kept the tears from falling, he could not stop the bitter pain of a breaking heart.

“Sherlock,” he softly begged. “Please don’t leave me here.”

Something strange happened, then.

Later, John would compare it to bursting forth like a cracked dam, collapsing away and washing free through the both of them. He flooded and swirled and drained to a single point, compressed to a sliver of a hair’s breadth, before entering a slipstream of pure consciousness.

In the moment it simply felt odd, so quick and so abrupt that John hadn’t a clue anything had happened until he found himself standing in a wooded glade.

The sun shone brightly overhead, dappling through leaves of oak and alder as they danced in the gentle wind. The air smelled of summertime and flowering growth. The trees nearby were gnarled with age and covered in carpets of moss and climbing vines. Younger saplings sprouted in the shadowed protection of their elders.

The land felt old. Older than the wood near the village where John’s gran had lived. Older than the stones of the inn at the center of town, which was said to have been built before the time of Edward the Confessor.

No, this place was far older.

John turned. A field of long grass and dainty wild blossoms spread in a sunlit clearing. At its center, a creature sat cross-legged in the grass, its back to John.

John stepped closer, and as he reached the edge of the clearing, he heard the soft drone of a voice coming from the creature. It raised a hand, and there on the tip of one finger crawled a tiny, fuzzy bumblebee.

It was humming a hypnotic chant:

“... _Sitte gé, sigewíf,_  
_sígað tó eorþan,_  
_næfre gé wilde_  
_tó wudu fléogan._  
_Béo gé swá gemindige_  
_mínes gódes,_  
_swá bið manna gehwilc_  
_metes and éþeles…”_  


A dry branch cracked beneath John’s shoe. The creature turned its head, and the bumblebee on its hand flew off, buzzing in the sunshine.

“John?” it said in surprise.

Then it stood, tall and elegantly formed.

A pair of dark twisting horns rose from its head, sharply ridged and borne with the carriage of a crown. The face was shapely, angular, and largely human, save for a slight flattening of the nose and brow. The hair was fine and twiggy, like a delicate bird’s nest unraveled into sweeping curls, and the broad ears folded over softly like those of a deer. Its skin, lightly furred in the way of a horses’s hide, was the dark brown-grey color of charred wood bark, mottled with paler cream undersides. It had fingers and toes and a profoundly casual nudity.

But the eyes, John recognized. The blue of a clear summer sky, the green of new spring growth, the silver of cold wintry waters. Sherlock's eyes.

"Fascinating," Sherlock said, appraising John with great curiosity. "It's the rare druid who manages astral projection."

“Where are we?” John breathed.

Sherlock glanced around at the trees, his ears twitching inquisitively in the breeze. “We’re home.”

“Home?”

“The way it was. The way it ought to be.”

John’s gaze trailed up the stately arc of Sherlock’s horns. They seemed a natural part of his balance, proportioned to completeness with the rest of him.

“And… this is you?” John asked.

Sherlock nodded, his eyes soft and a little sad.

John reached out, confused, almost brushing Sherlock’s pelt with the tips of his fingers before pulling them back. “What…?”

Hinting at a smile, Sherlock took John’s hovering hand with his own. His palm was warm and dry.

“Come,” he said.

They wove through the underbrush, Sherlock’s bare feet sure and steady over the gnarled roots and clumps of foliage. John let himself be pulled along, all the while wondering if he was suffering the effects of a self-induced brain hemorrhage back on the heath.

Sherlock sat him on a mossy log deep in the forest. It was surprisingly comfortable, and up above splinters of light pierced the pines and broad-leafed oaks. The wood was cool and pleasant, and Sherlock sat himself at John’s feet, perfectly happy to rest on a bed of spongy ground cover.

The longer John looked at the strange face before him, the more of Sherlock he recognized there: the micro-mannerisms, the expressions, the way he watched John so intently. It was truly absurd after everything John quite clearly remembered had just happened, back in the park.

“I’m not entirely sure,” John started, “but I think you might’ve died. Am I dead too?”

Sherlock shook his head. “You’re not dead. You’re just visiting.”

“But you’re dead? Is that where we are? The afterlife of the folk?”

He rolled his eyes, and it was such a Sherlockian habit that John nearly laughed despite himself. “Really, John. The afterlife?”

“What else would you call this?”

“The other game on the chess board.”

Chess and draughts on a single plane, as Sherlock had likened the split between their worlds. John nodded, supposing he understood and yet feeling exactly the opposite.

“Would you allow me to explain?” Sherlock asked.

“Okay.”

A honey bee buzzed past and landed on Sherlock’s left horn as he settled on his knees. John wondered if it was the same one he’d been speaking to earlier.

"Once upon a time,” Sherlock began, “a being came into this world. He was of the wode or, as some call them, the woodwose. We’ve had many names.”

"I grew up in the ancestral woodlands of the Isle. This was a time when greensight was common, and humans saw the world for what it was. Humans lived on the outskirts of our world. They were few and far between, and easily outwitted if you did run across them. I found them an amusement when I was bored but otherwise paid them no mind.”

"Time passed, and the humans began encroaching on the wild places where we made our homes. We were many and they were few, but soon their numbers swelled. The most powerful of their greenseers became druids, wielding abilities beyond our understanding. Some druids were content to venerate the folk, but others tried to control us. Hurt us. Like many of the folk, I resented their coming. One evening I was sheltering from a storm in a small shrine when two young and prideful druids came seeking a dry place. I refused them. For my disrespectful actions, I was bound to this place."

“Bound?” John interrupted.

“Tied to the land,” Sherlock explained. “A small area on the shores of the Thames near a settlement the Romans later called Londinium.”

“Tied? Is that why— _oh_.” The nature of Sherlock’s strange paralysis suddenly struck John. He looked at Sherlock, horrified. “You reached the end of your tether.”

Sherlock nodded. "I was angry after. None among the folk had the power to undo it, and the druids were soon extinct. Then civilization came, felling forests so deep no human had ever tread their heartpaths. The Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans. On and on, all the same but by different names, all seeking to exert their power over the land. I've watched green things fall and grey things rise. I've seen smog choke out the beloved sky."

John felt ill. “You’ve been trapped in London for all this time? Christ…”

Sherlock dismissed John’s concern with a shake of his head and knelt closer, eyes filled with fervent purpose. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over now. What’s important is _you_. You herald a reawakening, John. The old knowledge is returning. The fact that you are here, that you can cross into a plane that is not your own without any guidance whatsoever, proves it. You never needed my help. I was an idiot, John. There is hope in the world and it has everything to do with you.”

“I don’t care about crossing. I don’t care about—” John stood in agitation. He paced a few times, struggling to find the proper words for the awful ache growing in his chest. “Sherlock, I saw you die. I asked you not to die.”

Sherlock rose to face him. He gently took John’s hand. "I will linger as an echo here,” he said. “The part of me that belongs. In this place, I am not truly gone.”

This place. This bloody place, wherever it was. John didn’t care about _this place_. “I want you back where you were,” he demanded, the heat in his throat rendering his voice thin. “I’m not—we’re not finished.”

Sherlock frowned. “Finished?”

John looked down at their joined hands. “I’ve never felt this way. It’s insane. It’s absolutely _mad_. Not after one night. It’s not possible…”

“John?”

He breathed in heavily and out again, then met Sherlock’s eyes with every ounce of courage left to him. “I think I’m in love with you.”

Sherlock stared at him. Not moving, not even blinking. His silence was deafening, and John quickly realized the error of his declaration.

“Maybe you’re not— but I thought you might be, and it doesn’t matter if you aren’t,” John babbled, face now burning as well. “Either way, I won’t let you stay here. I’ve never left anyone behind and I’m not starting with you.”

He waited for an answer. Finally, the fingers encasing John’s hand curled tighter.

“You’re wrong,” Sherlock said, his voice soft as the whisper between blades of grass. “You couldn’t be more wrong.”

John stubbornly set his jaw. “Well, you’re coming with me whether you like it or—"

Sherlock shook his head and pressed himself into John’s personal space, releasing John’s hand to instead caress his face. The intensity of his eyes purged the remainder of John’s words, and he gaped helplessly at his brilliant beauty. New form or old, Sherlock was Sherlock, and he left John utterly breathless.

“You’re _wrong_ ,” he said again, smiling as his long fingers trailed down John’s cheek. “I’ve loved you from the moment I met you, John. I love you as I never have loved another.”

Stunned, John caught Sherlock’s wrist. He examined his open hand, smooth palm and dark fingertips. Solid and warm. Alive. Hallucination or fever dream or whatever this was, Sherlock was there with him. Sherlock had spoken to him. Sherlock loved him.

His eyes shone with adoration, but the brightness was tempered by a glint of sadness. “After so many centuries,” Sherlock quietly said, “how fitting that we simply hadn’t enough time.”

Eyebrows drawing together, John let Sherlock’s wrist slip free. “Enough time?”

Sherlock did not speak at first. His expression grew distressed and he shied slightly from John, evidencing an ingrained compulsion to protect himself. Whatever he intended to say, it pained him deeply.

“The druid who cast the spell set one absolution,” he confided. “In the span of one night, before the sun’s rise, I must earn the love of a human, and they in turn must see me for what I am.” He glanced down at his true form. “We were close. Your greensight was nearly there.”

The breath vanished from John's lungs. “Sherlock…”

"You did more than anyone could have asked of you, John. It is not your fault."

At that moment, the earth began to shudder. John instinctively ducked Sherlock down behind the log to shield him from whatever was happening. An adjacent thicket of trees cracked apart. Roots thrust from the forest floor in a shower of clumped soil, and the thick trunks… stood up?

Sherlock guided John to his feet to greet the new arrival. It was vaguely man-shaped, with arms and legs and a face, though hunched and asymmetrical in the way of old age. Living plants composed its body: a long beard of swaying moss and creeping tendrils, stout appendages of multi-colored bark, pockets of shrubs and sprouts overflowing from every conceivable nook. Kindly hazel-green eyes surveyed John and Sherlock where they stood together.

Behind him, Sherlock pressed up to his shoulder. “John, meet the Green Man. He is a protector of the folk.”

The Green Man rumbled like stones shattering in a rockslide, and somehow John understood. “Welcome, greenseer,” he said.

This was far beyond the miniature sprites and hobs he’d met. John craned his neck upward, taking in the Green Man’s towering form. He’d see over the roof of a double-decker bus with ease.

“Hello,” John tried.

“Long have I wished to speak to your kind once more.” The Green Man’s eyes drifted downward, and John realized with a start that one of Sherlock’s hands was joined tightly with his own. “I see you have found your way to our cursed wode.”

“Can’t you do something for him?” John asked.

The Green Man blinked and tilted his great head, rustling the drapery about his chin. “Me? What would I do?”

John raised their united hands to his chest. “Give him back.”

“He is not mine to give, greenseer.”

Sherlock pulled his hand away from John. Cool resignation was written on face, a look which John now had the skill to recognize as a proxy of self-defense. “It’s all right, John,” he said.

“It’s _not_ all right,” John hotly insisted.

“I chose this.”

John could only shake his head. “No. _No._ ”

The mask of nonchalance flickered. Sherlock was trying to be strong and failing spectacularly. “If my death bought the time you needed to kill the barghest and see dawn unharmed, it was a hundred times worthwhile.”

John nearly punched him in the jaw. His left hand clenched into a fist, shaking at his side. He wasn’t losing Sherlock to a ploy of ill-conceived martyrdom. He wasn’t—

“Your death?” interrupted the Green Man. “Whoever said you were dead?”

Sherlock broke his gaze from John to scowl at the Green Man. “There is no cure for mistletoe. John saw me die. I _felt_ myself die.”

The Green Man made a sound like dry timber splitting. "Dusk and dawn are times of great power, young wode, and your greenseer has no small talent with healing. The poison was dispersed. You are not dead.”

John’s heart thumped loudly in his chest. His fist relaxed and he wet his lips with his tongue, willing to cling to any proffered shred of hope.

Beside him, Sherlock had stilled. “Not dead?”

“He has shattered many bonds this night,” said the Green Man. “It broke over the riverlands like a rotted limb pruned by a storm. A spell so old it was woven into the land itself, and upon its destruction felt by every member of your kin. It is what called me here to investigate.”

“No, you’re confused,” Sherlock argued, his voice growing thin but his eyes lit with desperation. “He couldn’t see me at the end. And the sun’s certainly risen by now—”

“Oh, my little wode,” the Green Man chuckled. “Whatever made you think he does not see you? There is more to sight than physical form. Or greensight, for that matter.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

The Green Man pressed a gnarled knot of a fingertip to Sherlock’s chest, jostling him. “He sees here, young wode. Into the heart. He looked inside and fell in love with what he saw.”

Thorough shock riddled Sherlock’s eyes when they met John’s again. They stared at one another, John at a loss for how he’d apparently managed to do something he knew nothing about.

“How could he not? Your heart has long hung heavy with the potential to love another,” the Green Man went on. “And here you stand, devoted to him selflessly, wholly, and have put his well-being before your own. That is the love in its purest form. It warms my weary soul to see it.”

John took Sherlock’s hand, grinning at him with unbridled affection. Sherlock seemed incapable of putting together a coherent thought, let alone moving.

“If there’s nothing keeping us here,” John said to the Green Man, “I’d like to take Sherlock home now.”

The Green Man gave a reverent nod. “That, greenseer, I can certainly do.”

A roar of white consumed them both.

 

* * *

 

Sherlock woke to the sweet scent of dry grass and distant rush of the wind through the trees. He inhaled deeply and blinked in the overwhelming morning sunlight. It felt as if an oppressive weight had lifted from his shoulders; the air came easy and the world was feather-light. Golden blues flooded the sky above and the sun’s touch was warm upon his skin.

But no, that warmth wasn’t the sun. Sherlock turned his head and there was John, shining bright as Belenus restored. He was clutching Sherlock where he knelt, his face slack and his eyes glazed over as he remained in his projection trance.

Sherlock pushed away from John’s grasp and rose to his knees. John stared blankly into space, rocking slightly in the breeze without Sherlock there to prop him upright.

He’d seen the trance ages ago but had no practical experience bringing a druid out of it. Sherlock threaded his arms around John, gently supporting him. His warm weight sent a pleasant prickle down Sherlock's backbone. John smelled like grass and sweat and fading adrenaline.

“John,” Sherlock said against his ear. “Come back to me, John.”

The plea appeared to work, because John abruptly twitched in his embrace. There was a sweeping intake of breath and an equally long release, and John sagged into Sherlock.

Sherlock pulled back to check him. John's blinked several times, appearing a bit dazed by the incident, which came as no surprise given the mental fortitude required to project your consciousness into another plane of reality. The folk crossed that threshold as easily as stepping through a door, but for a human it was an extraordinarily taxing exercise. Sherlock still wasn't sure how John had done it on his own.

"All right?" Sherlock asked, brushing John's neck as his gathered himself.

"Yeah," he answered. "Yeah, I think I'm..."

John stopped talking as his gaze lifted squarely toward Sherlock. His eyes widened for an instant, inescapably awed, before darting up and down Sherlock's body, and eventually settling on his face.

"God, look at you," John whispered.

He reached a hand into the empty air above Sherlock's head. The veil hiding his true form parted beneath John's fingers, and he grazed the curve of one horn. Sherlock shivered at his touch.

John smiled approvingly. “Woodwose, was it?”

“Call me what you like,” he said.

The dark blue of John's eyes flashed decisively. “Sherlock,” he hummed.

A druid’s kiss was one part enchantment and one part deceit, he’d once heard the elders say, and to give them your heart was to lose it entire. Sherlock agreed with the latter sentiment; he had willingly offered his, undivided. As John captured him in an impassioned kiss, his only thought was how wrong the elders were. The world bred danger like a noxious weed, but in the capable arms of John Watson, Sherlock knew he could not be safer.

When at last John’s kiss ended, Sherlock assertively pressed for another. John let out an amused chuckle and obliged, his fingers smoothing the unruly curls at the nape of Sherlock’s neck.

“I should’ve guessed you’d turn out a demanding prat,” John said, smiling.

“Only when it comes to things I can’t do without,” Sherlock told him.

John examined the shredded portion of his stained shirt, but Sherlock knew he wouldn’t find a thing. The sharp bite of his wounds had gone along with the burn of the mistletoe.

Together, they rose to their feet and walked out onto the open heath. The wind was picking up, and it was with some hesitation that Sherlock left John behind and approached the spot where the spell had locked him up mid-stride. 

A sudden fear gripped him that perhaps the Green Man was mistaken. He didn’t feel so very different than before, now that he thought about it. Druidic magic was fickle, and it was entirely possible the spell had atrophied into a permanent affliction that not even John might break.

Sherlock didn’t glance back, but he knew what he would see. John standing at a relaxed parade rest, perfectly calm and steady, eyebrows dropped low with concern. No matter what happened, John would still be there. And for the first time in Sherlock’s life, it would be enough.

He took a step. Then another, and another. His muscles never seized.

Sherlock looked around at the park. Birds chirping, leaves rustling. A morning gust ruffled the tail of his coat, but there was nothing keeping him from striding through the boring old heath. Or further, if he wished it. Straight on to the highlands, or west to the moors, or right into the great wide sea.

Heat stung at his eyes. Sherlock blinked it away, lost in the innumerable possibilities. Anything he wanted. Anywhere he wanted. Did the nightingales still sing among the highland pools? Did the lowland marshes still reflect the endless evening stars? Would his own kin remember him? A thousand sprawling woods and a hundred hidden rivers, peaks of undisturbed solitude and groves of contemplative retreat.

Fingers twined into his right hand and Sherlock glanced aside, finding John. His eyes held tender compassion, and Sherlock felt his heart swell.

“Where would you like to go?” John softly asked.

Sherlock could think of only one answer.

“Wherever you’ll be.”


	6. Epilogue

If there was one thing a woodwose enjoyed, John thought, it was lazing about.

Sherlock had splayed himself on the sunny riverbank, one hand absently swishing through the cool water. His eyes were closed and every so often one of his ears flicked sharply, repelling an invisible pest. In the bright sunlight, his pelt shone a healthy dark chestnut. John hadn’t realized how dull it had been when he first saw it.

Across the river, John climbed out of the gentle flow of water and seated himself on the rows of dry timber that had washed ashore over the eons, worn clean of their bark during the rise and fall of the seasons. Delicate white flowers sprouted in the rich soil between the logs, climbing toward the sun on long twining stems. Like the rest of the nemeton, the touch of natural forces was evident in the smooth polish of the wood.

It had taken a shockingly short period of time to adjust to constant nudity. Sherlock found John’s self-consciousness uproariously amusing at the start, and John had tried to explain it wasn’t the nakedness so much as the outdoors part that bothered him, where any old holidayer might pop through and get an eyeful.

"The folk don't allow humans to come here," Sherlock said, rolling his eyes at John's thick-headedness. "Not unless they have the sight."

Indeed, John’s fledgling greensight had exploded since their arrival. He was used to seeing the double-nature of things by now, like the subtle visibility of Sherlock’s true form beneath his human guise, but as soon as they entered the borders of the sacred grove, Sherlock’s pale skin and dark curls had quickly vanished in favor of his natural appearance.

John lost count of the days after that. They’d explored every corner of the nemeton together. He’d watched Sherlock bask in the nature he’d been denied for so long. It was different than the parks or even the lesser groves; John saw the health returning to him, day by day.

Mycroft had explained that woodwose were creatures of the deep forest, living long and often solitary lives except for their extended kin groups. He’d stayed in London to help Sherlock where possible, but even he had to remove himself to the wilds every few months. John didn’t know how Sherlock had made it so long on contaminated soils and rubbish-filled parklands.

And so John had done what he could to make their visit to the nemeton everything Sherlock needed it to be. Days lounging by the many streams and rivers, nights under the open sky, evenings watching the sunset filter through leafy boughs. He’d spent languid hours making love to Sherlock in the soft, fragrant grasses that grew beneath the trees, and hours more simply touching him, admiring him, savoring him. It was as if John’s very hands were giving life back to him.

He wondered if they weren’t.

The power of the nemeton was undeniable. John felt charged, empowered, utterly confident in his dominion over the grove and its inhabitants. He knew every plant for edibility on sight. The towering oaks that dotted the landscape were like giant fonts of rejuvenating energy. He sensed each spirit being that passed in and out of its borders. Some had come specifically to ogle them from afar, scattering away in fright when John reached out. Most had never met a greenseer but grown up on stories about their tricks. In time, they came to realize John didn’t intend to harm them. Sherlock’s presence helped; the rare woodwose were highly respected for their intelligence and ability to blend seamlessly with the human world.

John hadn’t managed to astral project since the first time it happened, although with guided help from Sherlock he sensed he was getting closer. The dangers were many, according to Sherlock, and he shouldn’t feel rushed to perform feats the druids themselves achieved only after a lifetime of work.

An enormous splash drove John from his thoughts. Sherlock had plunged into the pool, stirring the minnows into a swarm of panicked silver flashes, and he was now swimming his way over to John. With just his head sticking out, his horns made him look like a misplaced antelope frolicking through the water.

John stifled a laugh as Sherlock reached the shore and shook out his pelt. Sherlock quirked an eyebrow at him and climbed into the row of downed logs where John was sunning himself.

“Something funny?” Sherlock said.

“I was just thinking how silly you look,” John chuckled. “It’s worse than the coat collar. Do you ever decorate them?”

Sherlock contemplatively patted the base of one horn. “I’ve woken to the occasional flower garland. The spriggans think it amusing to wager on how long it will take me to notice.”

“A long time, I’d imagine. Especially when you get lost in that head of yours.”

Sherlock smirked. “They tend to go to rot. Mrs. Hudson called me a walking compost bin.”

They had a stout giggle at that. John invitingly patted the log next to him. “Fancy a lie down? It’s quite nice, the sun.”

“No,” Sherlock said, looking away. John thought he saw spots of color rise in the tips of his ears. “Actually, I’ve got something for you.”

Curious, John sat up as Sherlock reached for the travelsack they'd stored among the felled trunks and white flowers. It held John's abandoned clothes and a few other things, mostly of a personal or hygienic nature. The ancient druids might have been heathens, but John wasn't ready to brave the wilds without toothpaste, at least.

Sherlock removed a slim wooden box from the bottom of the sack. He must have hidden it in one pocket or another because John couldn’t recall seeing it before, and by the craftsmanship it wasn’t something he’d picked up on a whim on the way out to the nemeton. Sherlock set it on a flat span of log and looked up at John, almost shyly.

It was a pretty box, constructed of dark fine-grained wood that fit seamlessly together on silver hinges. John lifted the lid to reveal a velvet-lined interior, within which sat a circle of metal.

John picked it up. It was a bronze headband two fingers wide, lovingly shaped and inlaid with fine silver filigree forming boughs and branches and delicate leaves of oak.

“It’s beautiful,” John said. He glanced up, hesitant.

“You don’t like it?” Sherlock asked.

John rotated the band in his hands, trying to parse how it made him feel.

“It’s a symbol of people who hurt you terribly,” he said after a few moments. “I want nothing to do with their traditions.”

Sherlock laid his hands over John’s, gently pushing the band back toward him. “Then let’s make it _our_ tradition. If anyone who’s ever lived ought to wear it, John, it’s you.”

“I’m not a druid.”

“You’re everything they should have been,” Sherlock insisted. “A dedicated healer, a compassionate protector, a loyal friend to folk great and small. There are none left to name you, so I will take that honor.”

They gazed at one another. Eventually, John bowed his head.

Sherlock slid the band into place above his brow, gently adjusting the placement so it sat just so. It fit perfectly, lightweight and not a hindrance at all.

John blinked up at Sherlock as his hands fell away, and the look of pride that lit Sherlock’s eyes was one he wished he could preserve for all time.

“How is it, then?” John teased, pressing his fingertips to the cool metal rim.

Sherlock’s answer came as a fierce kiss. John sank back, cradled by a slope of wood as if sculpted by the elements to hold them. He draped his arms around Sherlock’s shoulders and succumbed to the enthusiastic adorations.

Sherlock eventually relaxed into a sprawl atop John, idly nuzzling into his tanned skin, the ridges of one horn scraping lightly against a nearby log. John watched the leaves flutter overhead amidst Sherlock’s soft, contented sounds. As they lay there, the bronze around John’s brow grew pleasantly warm in the sun.

“They wore others things too, didn’t they?” John asked.

Sherlock peered up at him with one iridescent eye. “Oh, yes. This is just the first. I plan to dress you in all manner of torcs and bangles and bands.”

“Anything appropriate for polite company?”

“You don’t want to wear the cloaks, John. Awful, itchy, hot things.”

John raised an eyebrow. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you wanted to keep me nude and sparkly.”

“Problem?” Sherlock innocently asked.

John gave his bare bum a playful smack. “Wanker.”

The giggled together as only they could, until the giggling turned into kissing, and then into slow, deliberate tasting. Sherlock's pelt was sleek and smooth beneath John's palms, all but dry from the bright sunlight, and their mingled hums and rumbles melting into the river's babble.

Sherlock lifted his head, one thumb reverently tracing the line of John's jaw, and his eyes clouded with considerations of an impossible enigma.

“Imagine it,” he murmured. “Me, fallen for a druid.”

John wondered how he’d ever thought Sherlock’s natural countenance strange. His two forms had become one in John’s mind, different sides of the same ethereal beauty, but also touched alike with sorrow. John only recognized its earlier presence now that it had fled, and considered that his greatest victory.

"We needn't go back," John said. "To London, I mean. We need never set foot in that city again."

Sherlock fell into deep contemplation of the offer, fingers absently caressing John, and it was a while before he finally spoke.

"The thing about the woods, John, is that there isn't much murderous intrigue to be found," Sherlock said, sweeping his gaze over the ancient trees above them. "This is pleasant, but I can't say it's my home any longer."

John brushed the fallen fringe away from Sherlock's eyes. "All right. But the moment you get too stroppy, I'm packing you out somewhere green."

Sighing resignedly, Sherlock leaned into John's touch. "Fair enough."

"As for myself," John said, "I wouldn't mind another kip in the sun."

Sherlock made a noise of opposition but cuddled up to John nonetheless, and was soon gently snoring at his side. John's eyes fell on the small white flowers. He snapped a sprig and tucked it into Sherlock's hair, below the junction of his right horn, and settled back to doze, wondering how long it would be before his ridiculous detective caught on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Beautiful artwork courtesy of khorazir!](https://khorazir.tumblr.com/image/150032279663)

**Author's Note:**

> [Come say hello on Tumblr!](http://antietamfalls.tumblr.com/)
> 
>  
> 
>    
> The Old English charm Sherlock hums is called 'For a Swarm of Bees'. As the title suggests, it's meant to deter bees from swarming.
> 
> “Sit ye victory-wives,  
> sink to earth.  
> Never be ye so wild  
> as to the woods flee.  
> Be ye so minded  
> toward my good.  
> as beeth every man  
> of food and home.”


End file.
